Prices of commodities, including metals, energy and agricultural products, rose markedly over the 2009 - 2010 period. Some observers have attributed a significant part of this increase in commodity prices to the U.S. Federal Reserve's large-scale asset purchase (LSAP) programs. Using event-study...

Das Thema Energieeffizienz findet in Politik, Wirtschaft und Wissenschaft bisher nur unzureichend Beachtung. Obwohl die Bundesregierung in ihrem Energiekonzept eine Entkopplung von Wachstum und Energieverbrauch vorsieht und einzelne Maßnahmen ergreift, werden die Energieeffizienzgewinne der...

The potential relationship between domestic environmental regulation and internationalcompetitiveness has evoked various speculations. The common neoclassical train of thought is thatstrict environmental regulation is detrimental to the competitiveness of industry, and that itinduces phenomena...

China’s exceptional economic expansion has led to rising energy demand and pollution as well as other environmental pressures. Strong efforts by the government have moderated emissions of some types of air and water pollution from high levels but others, including greenhouse gas emissions,...

China's national leaders have recently set ambitious goals to restructure and diversify the economy towards a more resource-efficient and sustainable growth path. To address the growing national environment and energy concerns, leaders introduced several binding environmental targets for...

This paper examines whether lax environmental policy and abundant natural resources both attract foreign direct investment (FDI). At first, their potential effects are discussed using arguments from the pollution haven hypothesis and the natural resource curse. Using cross-country Ordinary Least...

Idle land remains to be an issue that warrants further investigation. This study aspires to unveil the economic potential of idle land which is cultivated with a combination of cash crops -- vegetables and fruits by young enterprising individuals. Linear programming is employed to derive optimal...

We develop and test a model of social comparison in which individuals gain status through pro-social behavior (competitive altruism) and in which they endogenously choose the reference group and associated reference standard involved in signaling status (reference group selection). In our...

Countries need capacity for a variety of reasons, including sustaining economic growth, generating jobs, reducing poverty, effectively managing development programmes, and transforming societies and economies. A lot of effort has been expended to develop capacity in Africa with mixed results....

This paper demonstrates that cooperation in international environmental negotiations can be explained by preferences for equity. Within a N-country prisoner's dilemma in which agents can either cooperate or defect, in addition to the standard non-cooperative equilibrium, cooperation of a large...