Five Essays in the Economics of Climate Engineering, Research, and Regulation under Uncertainty

This thesis revolves around two of the most prominent strategies for tackling environmental problems. One is technological innovation with a focus on Climate Engineering technologies, mostly Solar Radiation Management (SRM) (Crutzen 2006; Keith 2013). The other is regulatory decision-making under fundamental uncertainty. Research and learning are intimately linked with both strategies, thus playing a connecting role in this dissertation. Methodologically, this thesis takes a theoretical approach, combining modern environmental economics with recent developments in decision theory and the literature on regulation. The first part of this thesis advances the current state of knowledge on technological solutions to environmental problems, taking Climate Engineering technologies as an illustration. The focus here is on the implications of specific strategic conflicts on the incentives to develop SRM technologies with costly R&D. The two dimensions of strategic conflict analyzed are the intergenerational conflict among generations when the generation providing the technology for a future generation anticipates that the way the technology will be used is different from its own preferred profile (“The Intergenerational Transfer of Solar Radiation Management Capabilities and Atmospheric Carbon Stocks”) and the intragenerational conflict among countries that have different preferences for the amount of global cooling (“Free rider vs. free driver – R&D incentives for environmental technologies”). The findings can be summarized as follows: First, the intergenerational strategic conflict that results if a current generation cannot stipulate the specific use of SRM technologies can give rise to a rich set of outcomes in terms of R&D decision and abatement efforts, including the ban of SRM, abatement collapse, but also the development of SRM accompanied by an increase in abatement efforts in order to nudge future generation towards a specific use of the technology. Second, the anticipation of strategic conflicts between countries can give rise to suboptimal low or suboptimal high investments in R&D, depending on whether the expected strategic conflict in the deployment profile of the Climate Engineering technology is a standard free-rider or a free-driver conflict; the latter occurs if one country chooses high levels of SRM and thus imposes an externality on other countries (Weitzman 2012). The second part of this thesis focuses on regulatory decisions under uncertainty for which the standard expected utility framework is inadequate. This may happen if the matter of regulation involves complex processes or novel substances and thus requires a description of knowledge that goes beyond a unique probability distribution formulation. A well-known alternative are multiple prior models (static and dynamic axiomatizations were provided by Gilboa and Schmeidler 1989 and Epstein and Schneider 2003/2007, respectively). The third and fourth paper in this thesis overcome shortcomings in the existing decision-theoretic literature on multiple prior by establishing a consistent notion of the value of information (“Informativeness of Experiments for MEU – A Recursive Definition”) and well-behaved learning dynamics (“Learning Under Ambiguity – A Note on the Belief Dynamics of Epstein and Schneider (2007)”) for maxmin expected utility (MEU) preferences, a well-established ambiguity averse decision rule widely used to model precaution (Vardas and Xepapadeas 2010; Heal and Millner 2013). These decision-theoretical contributions stand for themselves, but also build the ground for the main paper in this part (“Information acquisition under Ambiguity – Why the Precautionary Principle may keep us uninformed”). This paper connects learning and technology choices by focusing on regulatory settings like the approval of a new pesticide in which ambiguous scientific knowledge can be reduced by the regulator by means of (costly) research, for instance with animal testing. In decision-theoretic terms, this paper analyzes active learning under ambiguity and is, to our knowledge, the first model to do so. We find a complex and surprising interplay of the maxmin rule and the research behavior of the regulator: Our results suggest that, despite its notion of precaution, the maxmin rule often leads to an underinvestment in research relative to a standard expected utility regulation, giving rise to a counterintuitive increase in erroneous regulatory decisions (for instance the approval of harmful pesticides). Jointly, the five papers in this thesis contribute to theoretical environmental economics by furthering our knowledge on the role of learning when science is uncertain, on the role of technologies, and on the interplay between technological solutions and uncertainty

Watershed Management on Range and Forest Lands Proceedings of the Fifth Workshop of the United States/Australia Rangelands Panel

Preface: The U.S.-Australia Cooperative Rangeland Science Program In October 1968 the governments of the United States and Australia entered into an agreement for the purpose of facilitating close cooperative activities between the scientific communities of the two countries. The joint communique issued at that time designated the U.S. National Science Foundation and the Australian Commonwealth Department of Education and Science as the coordinating agencies. Both countries were to encourage binational teamwork in research, interchanges of scientists, joint seminars, and exchanges of information. A United States-Australia Rangeland Panel was established in December 1969 to further cooperation between the two countries in the rangeland sciences. The present panel includes the following

Decision-making in the fund management industry: Empirical evidence from European fund managers, buy-side analysts and sell-side analysts

This thesis responds to calls from prominent academics for research on the so-called investment management ‘black box’ of decision-making practices in capital markets.Motivated by four overarching research objectives, the study examines the following key areas of investment management praxis: (1) the backgrounds, personal traits and investment management proclivities that tend to influence the decision-making practices of portfolio managers, buy-side analysts and sell-side analysts; (2) the utility of intrinsic and relative accounting valuation techniques for pricing equities; (3) the utility of single and multi-factor risk-adjusted finance models for pricing equities; and (4) the utility of sell-side research in buy-side equity decision-making.Adopting a mixed-methods research philosophy, the study conducted in-depth semi-structured interviews with 10 high-ranking European fund managers, and collected 339 completed structured questionnaires from portfolio managers, buy-side analysts and sell-side analysts around the world, to build on the ‘black box’ perspectives provided by Brown et al. (2015), Bradshaw (2011), Ramnath et al. (2008), Brown (1993), Schipper (1991) and Arnold & Moizer (1984).The main findings reveal that capital market participants are: (1) ambivalent to human capital. The interview findings indicate that portfolio managers view gender, experience, age, education and graduate skills to be important workplace attributes that tend to positively influence buy and sell-side investment management practices, but comparatively, for example, the questionnaire findings reveal huge gender disparity exists across buy and sell-side firms even though the evidence reveals females frequently outperform their male counterparts; (2) ambivalent to accounting theory. Investment managers use DCF and P/E techniques as the mainstay of their accounting-based valuation practices, but seldom take advantage of convenient short-cut approaches to intrinsic valuation, such as RIV or AEG; (3) ambivalent to modern finance theory. Investment managers use CAPM a lot, but seldom use CCAPM, ICAPM, APT or other stylised single or multi-factor finance models to price equity stocks; and (4) ambivalent to sell-side equity research. Portfolio managers and buy-side investment managers believe it is currently unfit for purpose, citing sell-side bias and dysfunctional sell-side incentive schemes as the primary attributing factors. Some of the more notable manifestations of their ambivalence towards the sell-side include: (a) ‘binning’ sell-side analysts’ reports with disquieting regularity; (b) distrustful of analysts’ earnings forecasts, stock recommendations and price targets, yet expressing confidence in their periodic earnings updates and revisions; (c) incredulous, per se, towards sell-side ‘industry knowledge’, yet accepting of ‘specialised’ sell-side industry knowledge, (d) wary of Institutional Investor All-Star sell-side status rankings, yet believing innate ability, work experience, education, age and sometimes gender equip some sell-side analysts with a comparative, even star-like, advantage in analysing certain stocks.The findings also identify a need to: (1) redefine theoretical explanations of ‘value premiums’ because apocryphal stories in the accounting and finance literature (Penman, 2011; and Fama and French, 1992/3) about ‘value’ stocks and ‘growth’ stocks can sometimes mislead1 investors; (2) re-assess the value-relevance of theoretical market efficiency (Fama (1970) because the evidence indicates that capital markets are becoming more efficient as new technologies begin to permeate the investment management industry – which in turn has implications for the ‘active’ and ‘passive’ investment management paradigms; (3) recognise the emerging educational importance of big data reduction and computer algorithm skills, lest under-graduate and post-graduate education1 Arguably, ‘value’ stocks are simply ‘cheap’ or ‘bargain’ stocks.falls out of step with employers’ fast changing needs; and (4) recognise that gender diversity is extremely lacklustre across the investment management industry; and (5) re-assess the value-relevance of conference calls and private communications with company management because some investment managers distrust them, preferring to observe and judge management and/or their communications from a distance

Overseas Trained Teachers' Experiences of Professional Socialisation in New Zealand

This research traces the early experiences of overseas trained teachers (OTTs) recommencing their careers in urban secondary schools in New Zealand. The teachers’ professional lives during the first three terms of their employment are explored through their experiences. Participants’ share their perceptions and interpretations of the new situations, processes and events they encounter in their schools and beyond. The purpose of this research is to discover how immigrant teachers experience the systems and processes required to become members of their professional community. Aspects of participants’ experiences of national systems for immigration, qualification recognition, teacher registration, and salary assessment are discussed. School systems for teacher induction and professional learning are also critiqued. The research contributes to the debate about the role and integration of OTTs in New Zealand schools. It will be of interest to national agencies, school principals and those with responsibility for teacher supply, teacher education and the provision of ongoing professional learning for teachers. The research also contributes to greater understanding of the lived experiences of migrant professionals in New Zealand. An interpretive research paradigm has been followed and a hermeneutic phenomenological methodological approach chosen to capture the lived experiences of the participants through their journeys towards professional socialisation. The research is guided by the philosophical thinking of Heidegger, Gadamer and van Manen. Ten participants shared their lived experiences through reports and anecdotes of events, relationships, emotions, and subjectivities as they occurred within the structures, institutions, and policies of their new environments. The findings revealed OTTs’ negative experiences with multilayered systems as they strove to establish their private and professional identities. The findings have uncovered systemic failure by agencies and schools to provide the necessary formal induction and ongoing assistance to meet the perceived needs of OTTs and facilitate their transition into New Zealand classrooms. It is shown that schools and their OTTs rely heavily on informal arrangements between colleagues to overcome knowledge gaps and communicate information. The progress of immigrant teachers towards professional socialisation is affected by their positioning and that of their schools. It is also shown to be aided by involvement with extra-curricula activities and the resumption of familiar hobbies, sports and interests. The research raises concern for the sustenance of OTTs in the New Zealand teaching community. It indicates that there is need for a wider study, and the follow up of teachers who immigrate to New Zealand to inform the systems and procedures for their professional socialisation

Anna Seward and the End of the Eighteenth Century

Anna Seward and her career defy easy placement into the traditional periods of British literature. Raised to emulate the great poets John Milton and Alexander Pope, maturing in the Age of Sensibility, and publishing during the early Romantic era, Seward exemplifies the eighteenth-century transition from classical to Romantic. Claudia Thomas Kairoff’s excellent critical study offers fresh readings of Anna Seward’s most important writings and firmly establishes the poet as a pivotal figure among late-century British writers. Reading Seward’s writing alongside recent scholarship on gendered conceptions of the poetic career, patriotism, provincial culture, sensibility, and the sonnet revival, Kairoff carefully reconsiders Seward’s poetry and critical prose. Written as it was in the last decades of the eighteenth century, Seward’s work does not comfortably fit into the dominant models of Enlightenment-era verse or the tropes that characterize Romantic poetry. Rather than seeing this as an obstacle for understanding Seward’s writing within a particular literary style, Kairoff argues that this allows readers to see in Seward’s works the eighteenth-century roots of Romantic-era poetry. Arguably the most prominent woman poet of her lifetime, Seward’s writings disappeared from popular and scholarly view shortly after her death. After nearly two hundred years of critical neglect, Seward is attracting renewed attention, and with this book Kairoff makes a strong and convincing case for including Anna Seward's remarkable literary achievements among the most important of the late eighteenth century

Skyscraping Frontiers

As a space of extremes, the skyscraper has been continually constructed as an urban frontier in American cultural productions. Like its counterpart of the American wilderness, this vertical frontier serves as a privileged site for both subversion and excessive control. Beyond common metaphoric readings, this study models the skyscraper not only as a Foucauldian heterotopia, but also as a complex network of human and nonhuman actors while retracing its development from its initial assemblage during the 19th century to its steady evolution into a smart structure from the mid-20th century onward. It takes a close look at US-American literary and filmic fictions and the ways in which they sought to make sense of this extraordinary structure throughout the 20th and early 21st centuries. More traditional poststructuralist spatial theories are connected with concepts and methods of Actor-Network Theory in a compelling account of the skyscraper’s evolution as reflected in fictional media from early 20th-century short stories via a range of action, disaster and horror films to selected city novels of the 1990s and 2000s

Eying Italians: Race, romance, and reality in American perception, 1880--1910

This dissertation explores how American representations of Italians and Italian Americans engaged, reflected and helped shape the United States\u27 developing concepts of immigration, ethnicity, race, and national identity from 1880 to 1910, when masses of Italian and other new immigrants rigorously tested the country\u27s attitudes and powers of assimilation. In a larger sense, the research examines how the process of constructing the modern Italian/Italian American was part of the process of America constructing for itself a modern national identity for a new century.;The dissertation looks at a variety of texts, including journalism, travel literature, autobiography, fiction, and photographs and illustrations of the period, but concentrates on a handful of American writers and their works. Chapter 1 compares the reportage and photography of the immigrant journalist Jacob A. Riis with the reporting of the new immigrant journalist Edward A. Steiner. Chapter 2 examines Henry James\u27s The American Scene in the context of his other writings on Italy and Italians, including travel essays, short stories, and The Golden Bowl . Chapter 3 focuses on Mark Twain\u27s The Innocents Abroad and I. Also part of the discussion are two works by William Dean Howells, Venetian Life and A Hazard of New Fortunes .;The research showed that these writers alternately supported and subverted America\u27s often conflicting and confused attitudes and ideas about Italy and Italians, a tangle of discourses related to the romance of artistic, heroic, picturesque Italy and the reality of the Italian Other arriving in the form of masses of immigrants on American shores

Unraveling Anti-Federalist Ideology through a Conceptual Framework of Natural Rights

This master thesis begins with a detailed telling of the history of the Anti-Federalist movement. At the time, the United States was undergoing a huge change. The entire government was in the process of being replaced with a fundamentally different one. Dismantling all pre-existing state and local governments, and forming one unitary government. Some people were understandably fearful of this and Anti-Federalism was born. The Anti-Federalist group was extremely diverse, with internal disagreements on nearly every concept. The author argues that the one thing that all Anti-Federalists mutually agreed upon was the existence of inalienable natural rights including the natural right to self-ownership and the ownership of legitimately gained property. The Anti-Federalists worried that the Constitution contained unsuitable and unspecified objectives for an excessive government, and therefore threatened these natural rights. It was this worry of the extinguishing of natural rights that the Anti-Federalists universally opposed. The author concludes with reflections on researching and writing for the thesis