Environmental standards as barriers to trade

This paper examines the case of a good, polluting in consumption, whose pollutive content is restricted by a government with strong environmental policies. When foreign producers are unable to comply with the restrictive environmental standard of such a country, to which they wish to export, they often allege that those standards constitute illegal barriers to free trade. An example of such a good is gasoline, excessively pollutive formulations of which are prohibited from importation into the United States by the 1970 Clean Air Act. Rather than banning them, such imports should be taxed, along with the domestically produced substitute good, according to their respective pollutant contents. This would foster economic efficiency and should be more acceptable to foreign producers than the outright prohibition mandated by the Clean Air Act. The results of this paper reaffirm the argument in a previous article in this journal (Socio-Economic Planning Sciences 29 (1995) 187), though the countries’ roles in the two papers are reversed, that free trade and Pigouvian environmental policies increase international welfare.     

Human–capital investment and the wage gap

Summary. According to empirical studies, the wage differential by skills evolved non–monotonically in the past decades although the relative supply of skilled labor steadily increased. The present paper provides a theoretical explanation for this finding. In our setting, technological change intertemporally alters the human–capital investment incentives of heterogeneous individuals. As a consequence of changing incentives, the time path of the relative wage is U–shaped while there is a rise in the share of skilled workers. Received: November 28, 2000; revised version: January 30, 2001     

The Middle Class Consensus and Economic Development

A middle class consensus is defined as a high share of income for the middle class and a low degree of ethnic divisons. The paper links a middle class consensus to resource endowments, along the lines of the provocative thesis of Engerman and Sokoloff (1997 and 2000). This paper exploits this association using tropical resource endowments as instruments for inequality. A higher share of income for the middle class and lower ethnic divisions are associated with higher income and higher growth, as well as with more education, better health, better infrastructure, better economic policies, less political instability, less civil war and ethnic minorities at risk, more social modernization and more democracy.     

A theory of persistent income inequality

This paper explores the dynamics of income inequality by studying the evolution of human capital investment and neighborhood choice for a population of families. Parents affect the conditional probability distribution of their children's income through the choice of a neighborhood in which to live. Neighborhood location affects children both through local public finance of education as well as through sociological effects. These forces combine to create incentives for wealthier families to segregate themselves into economically homogeneous neighborhoods. Economic stratification combines with strong neighborhoodwide feedback effects to transmit economic status across generations, leading to persistent income inequality.     

城乡居民收入差距的动态演变:1988～2002年

中国城乡居民收入差距已经引起广泛关注。文章以住户调查数据为基础,利用泰尔指数分解、G.Fields分解、Blinder分解、分位回归分解等多种方法讨论了1988年、1995年和2002年“城乡”因素本身对城乡居民收入差距的贡献。这些分解结果表明我国的城乡差距较显著并在不断扩大;而且城乡差距更不利于农村中的低收入人群。     

消费文化、认知偏差与消费行为偏差

本文放松了理性经济人假设,在行为经济学双曲线贴现模型框架下,以"自我控制"认知偏差及相应的模型参数设定对东西方消费文化差异进行了技术表达,进而阐明了消费过度(欧美国家)和消费不足(东亚国家)这两类消费行为偏差的形成机制。本文采用全球48个国家和地区1978—2007年的面板数据,以儒家虚拟变量和性生活指数作为消费文化的替代变量检验了文化与消费的关系。结果表明,在解释东西方消费率差异时,预防性储蓄等传统理论的解释力远低于不可观测的国家个体效应。儒家虚拟变量和性生活指数能分别解释国家个体效应的28%和58%。这表明消费文化等不随时间改变的个体因素比传统变量更能解释各国居民的消费差异。实践层面上,双曲线贴现模型中锁定技术能有效纠正"自我控制"认知偏差,从而消解儒家文化对消费的深度抑制,可为扩大内需政策创新提供思路启发和技术支撑。     

Income inequality, democracy and growth reconsidered

Persson and Tabellini (Persson, T., Tabellini, G., 1992a. Growth, distribution and politics. Eur. Econ. Rev. 36, 593–602; Persson, T., Tabellini, G., 1992b. Growth, distribution and politics. In: Cukierman, A., Hercowitz, Z., Leiderman, L. (Eds.), Political Economy, Growth, and Business Cycles. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, pp. 3–22; Persson, T., Tabellini, G., 1994. Is inequality harmful for growth? Am. Econ. Rev. 84, 600–621) as well as Alesina and Rodrik (Alesina, A., Rodrik, D., 1992. Distribution, political conflict, and economic growth. In: Cukierman, A., Hercowitz, Z., Leiderman, L. (Eds.), Political Economy, Growth, and Business Cycles. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, pp. 23–50; Alesina, A., Rodrik, D., 1994. Distributive politics and economic growth, Q. J. Econ. 109, 465–490) have argued that income inequality reduces economic growth rates among democracies because it promotes distributional struggles. In this paper I question the supportive evidence for a number of reasons. Measures of income distribution and democracy are unreliable and permit only very tentative conclusions. Changes in data sources or recoding of some influential cases affect results. It is questionable whether equality effects on growth apply only within democracies, as a median voter interpretation of this relationship should make one expect. The general idea that distributional struggle hurts the growth prospects of nations, however, receives some empirical support.     

Measuring Inequalities without Linearity in Envy: Choquet Integrals for Symmetric Capacities

The (generalized) Gini indices rely on the social welfare function of a decision maker who behaves in accordance with Yaari's model, with a function f that transforms frequencies. This SWF can also be represented as the weighted sum of the welfare of all the possible coalitions in the society, where the welfare of a coalition is defined as the income of the worst-off member of that coalition. We provide a set of axioms (Ak) and prove that the three following statements are equivalent: (i) the decision maker respects (Ak), (ii) f is a polynomial of degree k, (iii) the weight of all coalitions with more than k members is equal to zero. Journal of Economic Literature Classification Number: D63.     

我国城镇居民收入分配差距的实证研究

笔者首先计算了几种度量收入分配差距的指标,从不同角度的分析得到了我国城镇居民收入分配差距不断扩大的结论;其次估计了我国城镇居民的基尼系数.通过计量经济模型,检验了高、中、低各阶层可支配收入与收入分配差距之间的关系,得出结论:增加中低收入阶层的可支配收入,遏制高收入阶层可支配收入,可以减小基尼系数,从而降低收入分配差距;进一步通过模型发现,我国发达地区的经济发展和收入分配差距呈现出倒U型规律,说明经济发展达到一定水平,收入分配差距有望缩小.     

中国经济增长与能源消费空间面板分析

近年来面板数据广泛应用于各类统计分析,但变量的空间相关并没有引起足够的重视。本文引入空间面板回归模型研究中国各省市区经济增长和能源消费的关系。利用matlab软件及其spatial econometric模块建立和比较传统面板回归模型与空间面板回归模型,结果表明空间面板回归模型较传统面板回归模型优越,本文的研究为空间面板数据分析提供了一个应用实例。