Singular justice and software piracy

This paper assumes that the purpose of ethics is to open up a space for the possibility of moral conduct in the flow of everyday life. If this is the case then we can legitimately ask: ‘How then do we do ethics?’ To attempt an answer to this important question, the paper presents some suggestions from the work of Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida. With Levinas, it is argued that ethics happens in the singularity of the face of the Other before me ‘here and now’. Ethics matters in my everyday contact with the Other that disturbs my egological existence and claims my response. But what about all other Others, not here now but nevertheless simultaneously already present? What about their equal claim on me? With Levinas and Derrida, the paper attempts to articulate the notion of singular justice as the simultaneous demand of all others requiring my response. In singular justice, the paper attempts to show how the demands of ethics (the singular) and the demands of justice (all other Others) can become the impossible possibility for a ‘justice where there is no distinction between those close and those far off, but in which there also remains the impossibility of passing by the closest’. Furthermore, the paper attempts to argue that singular justice is our calling – or more precisely my calling – to do the right thing, here and now. Finally, by way of explication, the paper discusses a case of software piracy to try to show how singular justice can help us not to think about ethics, which is important, but to (almost) do it – which is very important.     

Evidence of a homeowner-renter gap for electric vehicles

This paper provides the first empirical analysis of the homeowner-renter gap for electric vehicles. Using newly-available U.S. nationally representative data, the analysis shows that homeowners are three times more likely than renters to own an electric vehicle. The gap is highly statistically significant, and remains even after controlling for income. For example, among households with annual income between $75,000 and $100,000, 1 in 130 homeowners owns an electric vehicle, compared to 1 in 370 renters. Additional controls do little to narrow the gap. The paper argues that this is a version of what economists have called the “landlord-tenant’’ problem, and briefly discusses potential policy implications.     

Optimum Growth and Carbon Policies with Lags in the Climate System

We study the optimal carbon tax in an economy in which climate change, stemming from polluting non-renewable resource, affects the economy’s growth potential. Our main contribution is to introduce and explore the natural time lag of the climate system between emissions and damages to capital accumulation in an endogenous growth setting. This allows us to investigate how optimal climate policy, and its interplay with climate dynamics, affect long-run growth and the transition of the economy towards it. Without pollution decay, a higher speed of emissions diffusion steepens the growth profile of the economy. With pollution decay, this leads to lower short-run but higher long-run economic growth during transition. Poor understanding of the emissions diffusion process leads to suboptimal carbon taxes, resource extraction and growth.     

EFFECTS OF FEDERAL CONSTITUTIONAL GRANTS IN BRAZILIAN MUNICIPALITIES

The objective of the present study is to verify the flypaper effect of 476 Brazilian municipalities from 2005 to 2012, considering the new variables as instruments of grants. Political alignment, alignment of the party, and coalition of the mayor with the federal president and of the state governor were considered as instruments of grants. A municipal tax autonomy index was considered as a control variable, which represents the percentage of local taxes in the municipal total revenues. The results allow concluding that the flypaper effect exists in Brazilian municipalities and is intensified by the alignment of the representatives in the same way of theoretical literature (Hamilton 1983; Hines & Thaler 1995; Inman 2008) and previous empirical studies in Brazil. Moreover, evidences of higher flypaper effect were found in municipalities with low tax autonomy.     

Modeling Financial Sector Joint Tail Risk in the Euro Area

We develop a novel high‐dimensional non‐Gaussian modeling framework to infer measures of conditional and joint default risk for numerous financial sector firms. The model is based on a dynamic generalized hyperbolic skewed‐t block equicorrelation copula with time‐varying volatility and dependence parameters that naturally accommodates asymmetries and heavy tails, as well as nonlinear and time‐varying default dependence. We apply a conditional law of large numbers in this setting to define joint and conditional risk measures that can be evaluated quickly and reliably. We apply the modeling framework to assess the joint risk from multiple defaults in the euro area during the 2008–2012 financial and sovereign debt crisis. We document unprecedented tail risks between 2011 and 2012, as well as their steep decline following subsequent policy actions. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Economic Growth and the Diffusion of Clean Technologies: Explaining Environmental Kuznets Curves

The paper provides a theoretical explanation for the inverted U-shaped relation between pollution and income often found in empirical research (Environmental Kuznets Curve). We model the transition in the pollution pattern as a change in general purpose technologies and investigate how it interferes with economic growth driven by quality improvements. We provide an analytical foundation for the claim that the rise and decline of pollution can be explained by endogenous innovations, policy-induced technology shifts, and intrasectoral changes. Once environmental degradation becomes too severe, regulation is introduced by which society forces the economy to make a transition to cleaner production.     

“Managing” Corporate Community Involvement

In academic research, many attempts have been undertaken to legitimize corporate community involvement by showing a business case for it. However, much less attention has been devoted to building understanding about the actual dynamics and challenges of managing CCI in the business context. As an alternative to existing predominantly static and top-down approaches, this paper introduces a social movement framework for analyzing CCI management. Based on the analysis of qualitative case study data, we argue that the active role of employees pressuring for CCI policies and practices, as well as the organization audience responses to their efforts, are at the core of the challenges involved in managing CCI. These challenges also pose limits to how far CCI can be extended to a “business as usual” activity.     

Universities and global competition for graduate students: scenarios for Latin America

The purpose of this paper is to lay out future scenarios related to the impact of the intensification of competition between universities and research centres of OECD countries on the stocks and flows of university graduates in Latin America. In conditions of intensified competence, it is possible that the ways in which Latin American countries, universities and university professionals participate in the processes of international mobility will change significantly. This paper proposes different scenarios, combining hypotheses about the global dynamics of skilled mobility and migration of graduate students (conditioned by the behaviour of the demand in developed countries), about their main impacts on Latin America, and about the responses that Latin American governments and universities could make to face this process.     

Common labor market,attachment and spillovers in a large metropolis

In this paper, we extend the home-attachment model to a setting with multiple (more than two) jurisdictions and consider non-cooperative policy making for provision of different types of metropolitan public goods in the presence of a common labor market. Migration and working place choices are independent. We show that the optimal redistributive policy implemented by a central authority always yields equalization of private consumption levels across jurisdictions. This result holds whether or not policy makers are able to anticipate migration responses to their policy choices. In the decentralized leadership games, jurisdictions make choices that fully internalize externalities.