Environment and Development Economics最新文献

We consider interval censored data with a cured subgroup that arises from longitudinal followup studies with a heterogeneous population where a certain proportion of subjects is not susceptible to the event of interest. We propose a two component mixture cure model, where the first component describing the probability of cure is modeled by a support vector machine-based approach and the second component describing the survival distribution of the uncured group is modeled by a proportional hazard structure. Our proposed model provides flexibility in capturing complex effects of covariates on the probability of cure unlike the traditional models that rely on modeling the cure probability using a generalized linear model with a known link function. For the estimation of model parameters, we develop an expectation maximization-based estimation algorithm. We conduct simulation studies and show that our proposed model performs better in capturing complex effects of covariates on the cure probability when compared to the traditional logit link-based two component mixture cure model. This results in more accurate (smaller bias) and precise (smaller mean square error) estimates of the cure probabilities, which in-turn improves the predictive accuracy of the latent cured status. We further show that our model's ability to capture complex covariate effects also improves the estimation results corresponding to the survival distribution of the uncured. Finally, we apply the proposed model and estimation procedure to an interval censored data on smoking cessation.

It is well known that a consumer price-neutral reform of consumption taxes and import tariffs is welfare-improving. This paper shows that such price controls are inferior to quantity controls in terms of welfare improvement. The paper next turns to a comparison of different abatement strategies. Whether or not policy changes should fix private abatement or public abatement relates to the level of earmarking, and depends on the relationship between private production and public abatement. There are cases in which increased public abatement only improves welfare by more than both increased private and public abatement together. The paper recommends that environmental earmarking in the form of public abatement should be delivered to cushion price hikes and sustain private energy consumption.

This paper examines the impact of cross-ownership on the strategic incentive of environmental corporate social responsibility (ECSR) within a green managerial delegation contract in a triopoly market engaged in price competition. It demonstrates that bilateral cross-ownership between insiders provides weak incentives to undertake ECSR, which has a non-monotone relationship with cross-ownership shares, while it provides strong incentives for outsiders, which increases the ECSR level as cross-ownership increases. It also compares unilateral cross-ownership and finds that a firm that owns shares in its rival has a greater incentive to undertake ECSR than its partially-owned rival, while an outsider has more incentive than firms in bilateral scenarios. These findings reveal that a firm's incentive to increase a market price through ECSR critically depends on its cross-ownership share, while it decreases environmental damage and increases social welfare when the environmental damage is serious.

The presence of monitoring institutions affects quality and effort of leaders. We investigate the effect of intensified monitoring on the ability and effort of leaders for a sample of forest user groups in Ethiopia, and find experimental and non-experimental evidence of an important trade-off: monitoring increases leaders' effort but lowers their quality in terms of education and experience. This effort–ability trade-off only occurs in the presence of alternative income opportunities (affecting the opportunity cost of time) and only among a subsample of leaders with low prosocial motivation. For our context, we document that the net effect of monitoring on economic outcomes is positive.