Environmental Kuznets curves for carbon emissions: A critical survey

The empirical finding of an inverse U-shaped relationship between per capita income and pollution, the so-called Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC), suggests that as countries experience economic growth, environmental deterioration decelerates and thus becomes less of an issue. Focusing on the prime example of carbon emissions, the present article provides a critical review of the new econometric techniques that have questioned the baseline polynomial specification in the EKC literature. We discuss issues related to the functional form, heterogeneity, “spurious” regressions and spatial dependence to address whether and to what extent the EKC can be observed. Despite these new approaches, there is still no clear-cut evidence supporting the existence of the EKC for carbon emissions.

Income inequality and growth: A regime-switching approach.

This paper explores the methodology of regime-switching in the analysis of the income inequality-economic growth relationship. The underlying idea is that when some income determinant passes a certain threshold introduces a new relationship between inequality and income and/or income determinants. There are three implications of the estimated models. First, inequality decreases with economic growth when government consumption as share of GDP is ‘low’. Second, in a ‘low’ inflation environment government consumption increases inequality. Third, in countries with ‘strict’ rule of law openness to international trade and government consumption are associated with lower inequality, while financial development implies higher inequality.Kuznets curve, regime-switching, growth determinants, thresholds

Smooth ‘inverted-V-shaped’ & smooth ‘N-shaped’ pollution-income paths

We explore the idea of regime switching as a new methodological approach in the analysis of the emission-income relationship. A static smooth transition regression model is developed with fixed-effects. The basic idea is that when some threshold is passed, then the economy could move smoothly to another regime, with the emission-income relationship being different between the old and the new regime. We motive our methodology by proving that the quadratic or cubic polynomial model used in the literature derives from the smooth transition regression specification. The methodology is applied a panel dataset on US state-level sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide emissions covering 48 states over the period from 1929 to 1994. We find robust smooth N-shaped and smooth inverse-V-shaped pollution-income paths for the sulfur dioxide. For the nitrogen oxide emissions environmental pressure tends to rise with economic growth in the early stages of economic development then slows down but does not decline with further income growth.Environmental Kuznets Curve, smooth transition regression, regime switching, thresholds

Major Directions in Populism Studies: Is There Room for Culture?

The article highlights the absence of a cultural dimension in the academic literature of populism and advocates in favor of studying grassroots social movements as the primary milieu where culture interacts with populist mobilization. Beginning with an original classification of existing schools of thought on populism that uses the historical figure of William Jennings Bryan as a conceptual yardstick, it moves on to lay out a framework for cultural analysis through the lens of collective action frame theory, based on an understanding of populism as a discursive mode of political identification