A Pollution Offset System for Trading Non-Point Source Water Pollution Permits

Water pollution from non-point sources is a global environmental concern. Economists propose tradable permit systems as a solution, but they are difficult to implement due to the nature of non-point sources. We present a pollution offset system for trading non-point source water pollution permits. Conventional pollution offset systems suffer from thin markets and transaction costs. In this paper, we show how to overcome these problems with a centrally managed common-pool market. We define permits as allowable nitrate loading to a groundwater aquifer. This trading system utilizes estimates of potential nitrate leaching from land uses, a set of transport coefficients generated from a simulation of nitrate transport in groundwater, an online trading system, and a linear program to clear the market. We illustrate the concept using a hypothetical case study.     

GAINS FROM TRADE

In a social choice context, we ask whether there exists a rule in which nobody loses under trade liberalization. We consider a resource allocation problem in which the traded commodities vary. We propose an axiom stating that enlarging the set of tradable commodities hurts nobody. We show that if a rule satisfies this axiom, together with an allocative efficiency axiom and an institutional constraint axiom stating that only preferences over tradable commodities matter, gains from trade can be given to only one individual in the first step of liberalization.     

The Financial Resource Curse*

In this paper, we present a model of the financial resource curse (i.e., episodes of abundant access to foreign capital coupled with weak productivity growth). We study a two‐sector (i.e., tradable and non‐tradable) small open economy. The tradable sector is the engine of growth, and productivity growth is increasing with the amount of labor employed by firms in the tradable sector. A period of large capital inflows, triggered by a fall in the interest rate, is associated with a consumption boom. While the increase in tradable consumption is financed through foreign borrowing, the increase in non‐tradable consumption requires a shift of productive resources toward the non‐tradable sector at the expenses of the tradable sector. The result is stagnant productivity growth. We show that capital controls can be welfare‐enhancing and can be used as a second‐best policy tool to mitigate the misallocation of resources during an episode of financial resource curse.     

Exchange Rate Populism

East Asian and Latin American economies present opposite exchange rate electoral cycles: exchange rates tend to be more depreciated before and appreciated after elections among East Asian economies, while the opposite is true in Latin America. We propose an explanation for these empirical findings where the driving force of the opposite exchange rate populism in these two regions is their difference in the relative size of tradable and non‐tradable sectors, coupled with the distributive effect of exchange rates. In a setup where policy‐makers differ in their preference bias toward non‐tradable and tradable sectors, the exchange rate is used a noisy signal of the incumbent's type in an uncertain economic environment. The mechanism behind the cycle is engendered by the incumbent trying to signal he is median voter's type, biasing his policy in favor of the majority of the population before elections.     

Domestic market integration and the law of one price in Brazil

This article presents the first assessment of domestic market integration in Brazil using the law of one price. The law of one price is tested using two panel unit root methodologies and a unique data set comprising price indices for 51 products across 11 metro-areas. We find that the law holds for most tradable products and, not surprisingly, nontradable products are found to be less likely to satisfy the law of one price. While these findings are consistent with evidence found for other countries, price convergence occurs very slowly in Brazil, suggesting relatively limited domestic market integration.     

Are wages equal across sectors of production?

The assumption that national labour markets are homogeneous across tradable and non‐tradable goods is common in multisector (open‐economy) macro models and crucial for the prominent Balassa–Samuelson hypothesis. To test it, this study introduces a novel, theory‐based method of distinguishing the tradable and non‐tradable sectors to the Balassa–Samuelson literature and employs modern empirical methods and a large and detailed macro dataset. It finds that both the internal relationship between productivity and wages in the tradable and non‐tradable sectors postulated by the Balassa–Samuelson hypothesis and its external transmission mechanism are rejected.     

The Behaviour of the Real Exchange Rate: Evidence from an Alternative Price Index

Although the long–run purchasing power parity (PPP) hypothesis is expected to hold across tradable goods, all price indices available to researchers for testing the validity of PPP contain some proportion of non–tradable goods prices, which may generate substantial persistence in the real exchange rate. We construct time series for quarterly price indices that minimize the presence of non–tradable goods for six major economies. Applying recently developed nonlinear econometric techniques to the resulting five US dollar real exchange rate series for the recent floating exchange rate regime, we provide evidence that the nonlinear mean reverting properties of these real exchange rate series are stronger than the mean reverting properties of real exchange rate time series constructed using the consumer price index (CPI). In turn, these results have a natural economic interpretation.
(J.E.L.: F31).     

Conserving biodiversity with tradable permits under changing conservation costs and habitat restoration time lags

Tradable permits are a common environmental policy instrument that has recently been applied also to the conservation of biodiversity. Biodiversity conservation differs in many respects to the classical applications of tradable permits like emissions control. One particularity is that, even if the permit system maintains a constant total amount of species habitat, habitat turnover (the destruction of a habitat and restoration elsewhere) affects the ecosystem. Another particularity is that the restoration of habitats often takes much time, leading to time lags between the initiation of restoration activities and the time when restored habitat is available for trading. We use an agent-based model of a tradable permit market to study the influence of heterogeneous and dynamic conservation costs and habitat restoration time lags on key variables of the market, such as the costs incurred to the market participants and the amount of habitat turnover. Our results show that there may be trade-offs between these key variables. We also find that restoration time lags can lead to fluctuations in permit prices that reduce the efficiency of the permit market. We conclude that temporal lags deserve a careful analysis when implementing tradable permit systems for the preservation of natural habitats and biodiversity.     

股权分置对中国资本市场实证研究的影响及模型修正

流通股和非流通股并存的特殊股权制度影响到中国上市公司股价和股数科学合理的确定,进而影响到几乎所有的中国股票市场实证研究结果。股权分置改革全部完成之后,涉及股改前数据的所有实证研究和数据库建设也都不能忽视改革前后的股数和股价的不可比问题。现有的基于股权分置的指标修正方法五花八门,也缺少合理的经济逻辑和数据支持。本文证明忽视股权分置现实,或者不适当的修正都将导致偏颇的结论,进而提出了一个通用的修正方法,即每股非流通股的价格相当于每股流通股的一个百分比。然后用实际数据对这个百分比的表达式进行了估计,从而对股权分置条件下价格模型与回报率模型进行了修正。结果显示,经过修正后的模型估计优于未修正的模型。在此基础上,我们研究了现在的全流通改革是否公平地补偿了流通股股东。结果显示,对于非流通股比率较小的公司,补偿是公平的,但对于非流通股比率较高的公司,还是存在着大的非流通股股东剥削流通股股东的现象。     

Productivity Growth of the Nontradable Sectors in China

Little is known about the total factor productivity of the nontradable sectors in China. In this paper we estimate productivity growth of the nontradable sectors by studying the relative price movements of the nontradable sectors vis‐à‐vis the tradable sectors, i.e. changes in the internal real exchange rate. We find that prices of the nontradable sectors have risen significantly faster than those of the tradable sectors since China's accession to the WTO, and as a result China's internal real exchange rate has appreciated faster than the renminbi real effective exchange rate. We also find that the nontradable sectors have seen much lower productivity growth than the tradable sectors. We argue that it is important to raise China's productivity growth in the nontradable sectors through policy actions to achieve growth rebalancing and containing inflationary pressures in the medium run.     

妨碍我国排污权交易政策实施的制度瓶颈分析

结合污染物的总量控制和排污许可证制度,我国已经进行了十多年的各类排污权交易试点工作。但是,排污权交易却至今未能形成一个全国统一的环境政策。本文利用制度分析框架从制度结构与不完全合约的角度对此进行分析,并认为妨碍我国排污权交易政策实施的制度瓶颈主要是排污权交易制度结构的缺陷。     

Informal self-employment and macroeconomic fluctuations

Informal self-employment is a major source of employment in developing countries. Its cyclical behavior is important to our understanding of the functioning of LDC labor markets, but turns out to be surprisingly complex. We develop a flexible model with two sectors: a formal salaried (tradable) sector that may be affected by wage rigidities, and an informal (non tradable) self-employment sector faced with liquidity constraints to entry. This labor market is then embedded in a standard small economy macro model. We show that different types of shocks interact with different institutional contexts to produce distinct patterns of comovement between key variables of the model: relative salaried/self-employed incomes, relative salaried/self-employed sector sizes and the real exchange rate. Model predictions are then tested empirically for Argentina, Brazil, Colombia and Mexico. We confirm episodes where the expansion of informal self-employment is consistent with the traditional segmentation views of informality. However, we also identify episodes where informal self-employment behaves “pro-cyclically”; here, informality is driven by relative demand or productivity shocks to the non tradable sector.     

绿色建筑产品相关可交易证书机制研究

我国建筑业资源的消耗水平远高于世界平均水平,控制建筑产品资源消耗对于保护环境、促进经济的可持续发展具有重要意义。受可交易排污许可制度的启发,探讨了可交易证书机制在绿色建筑规制中的应用可行性,从绿色建筑的节水、节能、节材、节地等方面入手,设计了绿色建筑产品相关可交易证书体系;并根据建筑产品开发建设的特点,设计了绿色建筑产品相关可交易证书规制政策,讨论了影响绿色建筑产品相关可交易证书机制的四个核心环节,认为只要标准设定、审核认证、证书交易与监督惩罚四个核心环节合理而有效,即可确保可交易证书机制的顺利实施。     

OBSERVABLE REPUTATION TRADING*

Is the reputation of a firm tradable when the change in ownership is observable? We consider a competitive market in which a share of owners must retire in each period. New owners bid for the firms that are for sale. Customers learn the owner's type, which reflects the quality of the good or service provided, through experience. After observing an ownership change they may want to switch firms. However, in equilibrium, good new owners buy from good old owners and retain high‐value customers. Hence reputation is a tradable intangible asset, although ownership change is observable.     

Portfolio allocation and international risk sharing

Abstract We show that recent explanations of the consumption‐real exchange rate anomaly that rely on goods and financial market frictions are not robust to introducing just one additional international asset. When portfolios are selected optimally, international trade in two nominal bonds implies a consumption‐real exchange rate correlation that is too high compared with the data even when there are many shocks. Monetary policy specification plays a potentially important role for the degree of risk sharing provided by nominal bonds, both in the benchmark model with only tradable and non‐tradable sector supply shocks and also in the model that allows for news.     

The Optimal Distribution of Pollution Rights in the Presence of Political Distortions

A critical issue in designing a system of tradable emission permits concerns the distribution of the initial pollution rights. The purpose of this paper is to investigate how the initial rights should be optimally set, when the determination of the number of tradable permits is subject to the influence of interest groups. According to the Coase theorem, in the case where there are low transaction costs, the assignment of the initial rights does not affect the efficiency of the final resource allocation. In the presence of political pressure, we show that the distribution of the initial rights has a significant effect on social welfare. In contrast to the conventional results, we find that grandfathered permits may be more efficient than auctioned permits, even after taking into consideration the revenue-recycling effect.      

The Cost-Effective Choice of Policy Instruments to Cap Aggregate Emissions with Costly Enforcement

We study the cost-effectiveness of inducing compliance in a program that caps aggregate emissions of a given pollutant from a set of heterogeneous firms based on emissions standards and the relative cost-effectiveness of such a program with respect to an optimally designed program based on tradable discharge permits. Our analysis considers abatement, monitoring and sanctioning costs, as well as perfect and imperfect information on the part of the regulator with regard to the polluters’ abatement costs. Under perfect information we find that (a) the total-cost-effective design of a program based on standards is one in which the standards are firm specific and perfectly enforced, and (b) the total cost of an optimally designed program based on standards is lower than the total cost of an optimally designed transferable emission permits system, except under special conditions. This is true when it is optimum to induce perfect compliance and when it is not. Under imperfect information, nevertheless, it is only by implementing a system of tradable permits and perfectly enforcing it with a constant marginal penalty tied to the price of the permits, that the regulator can surmount the informational problem and at the same time minimize the total cost of the program with certainty.     

碳排放配额政策的环境效应和贸易效应研究

基于不完全市场竞争理论,构建了两个对称国家碳排放配额政策选择与企业碳减排选择的两阶段博弈模型,运用逆向求解法求得了均衡解,并通过进一步分析碳排放许可证政策、碳排放配额许可交易政策和许可交易碳排放权合作政策的福利效应,得出了两国政府碳排放配额政策选择的激励相容条件和参与约束条件,确定了全局稳定均衡最优解及其条件;此外,还分析了两国政府碳排放许可证政策、碳排放配额许可交易政策和许可交易碳排放权合作政策的环境效应和贸易效应。结果表明：从福利效应来看,许可交易碳排放权合作政策是全局稳定最优解,可以资源的有效配置,实现Pareto改进;从环境效应来看,许可交易碳排放权合作政策也是严格占优的,有助于减少各国和全球净污染排放量;从贸易效应来看,碳排放配额许可交易政策好于许可交易碳排放权合作政策。因此,北-北型对称国家会优先选择许可交易碳排放权合作政策,南一南型对称国家在一定时期内仍然会优先选择碳排放配额许可交易政策,南-南或北-北型对称国家之间容易实现碳排放政策合作,实现全球环境合作还有待时日。     

Regional job multipliers

Job multipliers are often cited as justification for economic development incentives in particular industries. In this article, we use Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages data for counties in the State of Ohio to estimate the tradable sector’s job multiplier. We find that for each additional job in the tradable sector over a 10-year period, there are 1.6 jobs created in the nontradable sector. This multiplier estimate is lower for shorter periods of 1 year and 3 years. For the manufacturing sector specifically, we find the multiplier effect to be 1.2 jobs in the nontradable sector over a 10-year period. We also provide evidence that the multiplier varies over time. During the recessionary period of 2008 and 2009, the multiplier appears lower compared to the time period preceding and proceeding the recession.     

What Explains the High Returns to the IPOs of China's A‐Shares?

Abstract

This paper investigates the initial returns of Chinese A‐share initial public offerings (IPOs) under the split‐share structure before 2005. The split‐share structure refers to the coexistence of shareholders of tradable shares and shareholders of non‐tradable shares. The average initial return is much higher than those of other countries, even though this has been declining. We argue that the split‐share structure causes the initial returns of Chinese IPOs to be very high level in the beginning, and then to decrease slowly because of the institutional transition and the path‐dependent characteristics. With the reform of non‐tradable share offerings, the average initial return of Chinese IPOs is likely to fall.