Richer and cleaner—At others’ expense?

In rich economies emissions of many pollutants tend to grow at a slower rate than GDP. This could be a result of shifting comparative advantages. If so, net imports of dirty products to these economies will increase and rather than reduced, emissions will be relocated to other countries. In this paper we investigate if decoupling in a rich, open economy coincides with such pollution leakages abroad. Based on historical observations and model projections, we find little evidence to support this hypothesis. Historically, decoupling coincides with falling pollution leakages. Projections over a period of decades indicate a weakening of the decoupling, but that leakages will increase.     

A note on Deaton's theorem on the undesirability of nonuniform excise taxation

The paper provides an extension and a new proof of Deaton's theorem on the undesirability of nonuniform excise taxation when income taxes are affine and preferences over consumption goods are separable from labour–leisure choices, homothetic, and identical across agents.     

The exit decision in the European venture capital market

This article analyses the exit decision in the European venture capital market, studying when to exit and how it interacts with the exit form. Using a competing risks model we study the impact on the exit decision of the characteristics of venture capital investors, of their investments and of contracting variables. Our results reveals that the hazard functions are non-monotonic for all exit forms and suggest that, in Europe, Initial Public Offering candidates take longer to be selected than trade sales. Moreover our results show that, in Europe, venture capitalists associated with financial institutions have quicker exits (stronger for trade sales), and highlight the importance of contracting variables on the exit decision. An unexpected result is that the presence on the board of directors leads to longer investment durations.     

The price adjustment and lead-lag relations between stock returns: microstructure evidence from the Taiwan stock market

This paper investigates the price adjustment and lead-lag relations between returns on five size-based portfolios in the Taiwan stock market. It finds evidence that the price adjustment of small-stock portfolios is not slower than that of large-stock portfolios. Additionally, limited evidence supports a positive leading role of large-stock portfolio returns over small-stock portfolio returns. These two findings are substantially different from the results of previous research on developed markets.     

What is different about urban activities of those with access to ICTs? Some early evidence from Québec,Canada

The first wave, conducted in 2002–2003, of an in-depth panel survey in Quebec City, was used to compare the out-of-home activities of adults who had the use of mobile phones, or of internet at home, to those who did not. A unique feature of the survey was the inclusion of respondents’ perceptions of the both the temporal and the spatial flexibility of all executed activities. We find, after statistical controls for other factors, that mobile phone use was positively associated with activity and trip levels, while internet access was negatively associated. These two ICTs also had mostly opposite relationships with the routinisation and pre-arrangement of activities and with some conventionally defined sub-classes of activity.     

Pseudo empirical likelihood method in the presence of missing data

In this paper, we propose an estimator for the population mean when some observations on the study and auxiliary variables are missing from the sample. The proposed estimator is valid for any unequal probability sampling design, and is based upon the pseudo empirical likelihood method. The proposed estimator is compared with other estimators in a simulation study.     

SHOULD WE CARE ABOUT THE COMPOSITION OF TAX‐BASED STIMULUS PACKAGES?

We investigate the effects of tax policy shocks on the U.S. economy over the 1972:3–2008:4 period within a structural vector autoregressive (SVAR) framework. Disaggregating tax shocks suggests that the positive output multipliers documented for total taxes by the previous literature are present only for indirect tax innovations. We also show that both labor and corporate taxes have similar effects on output, with labor tax multipliers being slightly larger in magnitude. The positive and negative responses of inflation following respectively corporate and labor tax shocks imply that former shocks work through aggregate supply, whereas the latter work predominantly through aggregate demand. (JEL C32, E62, H20)