Pollution abatement efforts: a regional analysis of the Chinese industrial sector

Although China has had rapid economic growth, it has borne a more significant economic burden or loss because of environmental pollution. However, the country has addressed this problem with various pollution abatement efforts. Some prior studies analysed the relationship between such efforts and pollution emissions, but did not show how these efforts affect pollution reduction. This study investigates the effects of pollution abatement efforts on industrial SO_X, NO_X and CO₂ emissions in the context of pollution reduction in China by panel data for 29 provinces from 1995 to 2010. The empirical results are as follows. First, emissions have increased rapidly in the 2000s. Second, rapid income growth has led to a greater increase in emissions. Third, pollution abatement would assist improvements in environmental quality. Further, this study reveals that abatement efforts affect emissions through the adoption of pollution removal measures.     

Policy Reversals and Electoral Competition with Privately Informed Parties

We develop a spatial model of competition between two policy-motivated parties. The parties know which policies are desirable for voters, while voters do not. The announced positions of the parties serve as signals to the voters concerning the parties' private information. In all separating equilibria, when the left-wing party attains power, the policies it implements are to the right of the policies implemented by the right-wing party when it attains power. Intuitively, when right-wing policies become more attractive, the left party moves toward the right in order to be assured of winning, while the right-wing party stays put in a radical stance.     

Multi-valued Document Classification Based on Generalized Bradley-Terry Classifiers Utilizing Accuracy Information

Due to the development of computer network, a large amount of documents are treated in many fields. The number of digital document data stored in databases is enormous, accordingly it is difficult for analysts to read all documents and classify it by hand. Therefore, it is necessary to develop the technology of automatic document classification by using computers these days. From the above needs, many classifiers with good performance have been proposed, i.e., Relevance Vector Machine （RVM） and Support Vector Machine （SVM） that are known as good binary classifiers. For multi-valued document classification problems, it is known that a multi-valued classifier by combining several binary classifiers has a good performance. In this study, the method to construct an efficient combination of binary classifiers based on improving Generalized Bradley-Terry （GBT） model, which has high extensibility, is focused. This model is an expansion of Bradley-Terry （BT） model. Though the BT model has a limitation on combination of classes, the GBT model enables us to utilize any binary classifier which classifies into two arbitrary subsets in the class set. Generally, when several binary classifiers learn from the training dataset, there would be the difference of accuracy between these binary classifiers, due to the existence of categories that cannot be easily classified. However, the conventional method of multi-valued classification by GBT binary classifiers does not take the accuracy of each classifier into consideration. To avoid this problem, a new way of multi-valued classification method by considering each classifier＇s accuracy is proposed. The purpose of this study is to construct a good multi-valued classifier by calculating the accuracy of each classifier and utilizing it as the weight. In order to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method, the simulation experiment by using newspaper articles is conducted.     

Voluntary Export Restraints and Economic Welfare: A General Equilibrium Analysis

We derive some sufficient conditions for the Suzumura-Ishikawa proposition on voluntary export restraints to hold when their model is extended to a general equilibrium framework. The sufficient conditions are concerned with the magnitude of income effects which play no role in the partial-equilibrium analysis of Suzumura and Ishikawa.     

Postgraduate Education and Labor Market Outcomes: An Empirical Analysis Using Micro Data from Japan

Using a large micro dataset from Japan, this paper provides evidence on the relationship between postgraduate education and labor‐market outcomes. According to the analysis, the key findings include: (1) The employment‐to‐population rates of females and elderly people with postgraduate educations are higher than those with undergraduate educations. (2) The postgraduate wage premium relative to undergraduates is approximately 30–40 percent, which is similar in magnitude for male and female workers. (3) The wage reduction after age 60 is less for workers with a postgraduate education. (4) The private rate of return to postgraduate education exceeds 10 percent.     

Market Structure and Factor Price Equalization

There is a widespread belief that factor price equalization is "less likely" if some industries are imperfectly competitive and, in particular, that this is so if some industries are under the control of strategy-playing oligopolists. However, it is shown that, if each category of oligopolists is recognized as a primary factor of production, then the dimensionality of the set of endowments compatible with factor price equalization is independent of market structure.
JEL Classification Numbers: D33, D43, F12, L13.     

Rationalizable foresight dynamics

This paper proposes and studies the rationalizable foresight dynamics. A normal form game is repeatedly played in a random matching fashion by a continuum of agents who make decisions at stochastic points in time. A rationalizable foresight path is a feasible path of action distribution along which each agent takes an action that maximizes his expected discounted payoff against another path which is in turn a rationalizable foresight path. We consider a set-valued stability concept under this dynamics and compare it with the corresponding concept under the perfect foresight dynamics.     

COMMENTS ON "MONEY IS PRIVACY" BY CHARLES KAHN, JAMES McANDREWS, AND WILLIAM ROBERDS: MONETARY THEORY AND GAME THEORY*

Three classes of models on money closely related to game theoretic models are (i) search theoretic models; (ii) repeated games (in a narrow sense); and (iii) trading post games. This note tries to point out the sense of affinity between the theory of microfoundations of money and the theory of "repeated games" in a broad sense of the term.