40,704 research outputs found
The Regulation of Technology, and the Technology of Regulation
Regulation may inhibit or stimulate technological change. The relationship depends on the technology of regulation - the design and instrument choice of regulatory policy. This essay examines the history of economic and social regulations over the last three decades, the explanatory power of theories of regulatory politics, the choice of regulatory instruments, the assessment of regulatory impacts, and the influence of each of these on the innovation and diffusion of technology (and of regulation). It concludes with recommendations for the future of regulation and technology
Radiative Forcing: Climate Policy to Break the Logjam in Environmental Law
This article recommends the key design elements of US climate law. Much past environmental law has suffered from four design problems: fragmentation, insensitivity to tradeoffs, rigid prescriptive commands, and mismatched scale. These are problems with the design of regulatory systems, not a rejection of the overall objective of environmental law to protect ecosystems and human health. These four design defects raised the costs, reduced the benefits, and increased the countervailing risks of many past environmental laws. The principal environmental laws successfully enacted since the 1990s, such as the acid rain trading program in the 1990 Clean Air Act (CAA) Amendments and the 1996 Safe Drinking Water Act amendments, were consciously designed to overcome the prior design defects. New law for climate change should improve on the design of past environmental law, fostering four counterpart solutions to the prior design defects: cross-cutting integration instead of fragmentation, attention to tradeoffs instead of their neglect, flexible incentive-based policy instruments such as emissions trading in place of rigid prescriptive commands, and optimal instead of mismatched scale. This article advocates a design for U.S. climate policy that embodies these four design solutions. It proposes a policy that is comprehensive in its coverage of multiple pollutants (all GHGs), their sources and sinks; multiple sectors (indeed economy-wide); and multiple issues currently divided among separate agencies. It advocates explicit attention to tradeoffs, both benefit-cost and risk-risk (including both ancillary harms and ancillary benefits), in setting the goals and boundaries of climate policy. It advocates the use of flexible market-based incentives through an efficient cap-and-trade system, with most allowances auctioned along multi-year emissions reduction schedules that are reviewed periodically in light of new information. And it advocates matching the legal regime to the environmental and economic scale of the climate problem, starting at the global level, engaging all the major emitting countries (including the U.S. and China), and then implementing at the national and sub-national levels rather than a patchwork bottom-up approach. In so doing it addresses the roles of EPA regulation under the current CAA and of new legislation. It argues that among environmental issues, climate change is ideally suited to adopt these improved policy design features
A Smoothed P-Value Test When There is a Nuisance Parameter under the Alternative
We present a new test when there is a nuisance parameter under the
alternative hypothesis. The test exploits the p-value occupation time [PVOT],
the measure of the subset of a nuisance parameter on which a p-value test
rejects the null hypothesis. Key contributions are: (i) An asymptotic critical
value upper bound for our test is the significance level, making inference
easy. Conversely, test statistic functionals need a bootstrap or simulation
step which can still lead to size and power distortions, and bootstrapped or
simulated critical values are not asymptotically valid under weak or
non-identification. (ii) We only require the test statistic to have a known or
bootstrappable limit distribution, hence we do not require root(n)-Gaussian
asymptotics, and weak or non-identification is allowed. Finally, (iii) a test
based on the sup-p-value may be conservative and in some cases have nearly
trivial power, while the PVOT naturally controls for this by smoothing over the
nuisance parameter space. We give examples and related controlled experiments
concerning PVOT tests of: omitted nonlinearity; GARCH effects; and a one time
structural break. Across cases, the PVOT test variously matches, dominates or
strongly dominates standard tests based on the supremum p-value, or supremum or
average test statistic (with wild bootstrapped p-value
Climate Change Policy, and Policy Change in China
Solving the climate change problem by limiting global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions will necessitate action by the worldâs two largest emitters, the United States and China. Neither has so far committed to quantitative emissions limits. Some argue that China cannot be engaged on the basis of its national interest in climate policy, on the ground that Chinaâs national net benefits of limiting greenhouse gas emissions would be negative, as a result of significant GHG abatement costs and potential net gains to China from a warmer world. This premise has led some observers to advocate other approaches to engaging China, such as appeal to moral obligation. This Article argues that appeal to national net benefits is still the best approach to engage China. First, appealing to Chinaâs asserted moral obligation to limit its GHG emissions may be ineffective or even counterproductive. Even if climate change is a moral issue for American leaders, framing the issue that way may not be persuasive to Chinese leaders. Second, the concern that Chinaâs national net benefits of climate policy are negative is based on older forecasts of costs and benefits. More recent climate science, of which the Chinese leadership is aware, indicates higher damages to China from climate change and thus greater net benefits to China from climate policy. Third, the public health co-benefits of reducing other air pollutants along with GHGs may make GHG emissions limits look more attractive to China. Fourth, the distribution of climate impacts within China may be as important as the net aggregate: climate change may exacerbate political and social stresses within China, which the leadership may seek to avoid in order to maintain political stability. Fifth, the costs of abatement may decline as innovation in China accelerates. Sixth, as China becomes a great power in world politics, and as climate change affects Chinaâs allies, leadership on climate policy may look more favorable to Chinaâs elites. Seventh, the design of the international climate treaty regime itself can offer positive incentives to China. Taken together, these factors point to a potential and even ongoing shift in Chinese climate policy. They illustrate how the international law and politics of climate change depend on domestic politics and institutions. And they suggest that the United States, if it too takes effective action, can make the case for enlightened pragmatism as a basis to engage China in a cooperative global climate policy regime
Policy Design for International Greenhouse Gas Control
In this heart-searching, process based thesis, I want to find out who I am in the field of Architecture. Trough my urge to create, I am discovering and searching by making and producing objects by hand to feel and be present with the materiality, construction and art of architecture. My production of objects are divided in three parts based on scale, context and time, giving me a richer understanding about my will, intent and qualities.  "Two truths approach each other, one comes from within, one coming from the outside and where they meet there is a chance to see yourselfâ Tomas Tranströmer, Preludium II I detta hjĂ€rtsökande, processbaserade Xjobb, vill jag ta reda pĂ„ vem jag Ă€r inom omrĂ„det arkitektur. Genom min lust att skapa, upptĂ€cker och söker jag genom att göra och producera objekt för hand för att kĂ€nna och vara nĂ€rvarande med materialiteten, konstruktionen och konsten i arkitekturen. Min produktion av objekt Ă€r uppdelad i tre delar baserad pĂ„ skala, kontext och tid, vilket ger mig en rikare förstĂ„else om min vilja, avsikt och kvaliteter.  âTvĂ„ sanningar nĂ€rmar sig varann, en kommer inifrĂ„n, en kommer utifrĂ„n och dĂ€r de möts har man en chans att fĂ„ se sig sjĂ€lvâ    ToÂmas TranÂströÂmer, PreÂluÂdium I
A letter to the editor
The goal of this letter is to point out that the fastest way to weaken any society and its business model, including the IEEE and its reader-pays stance, is to lose your professional integrity
Robust estimation and inference for heavy tailed GARCH
We develop two new estimators for a general class of stationary GARCH models
with possibly heavy tailed asymmetrically distributed errors, covering
processes with symmetric and asymmetric feedback like GARCH, Asymmetric GARCH,
VGARCH and Quadratic GARCH. The first estimator arises from negligibly trimming
QML criterion equations according to error extremes. The second imbeds
negligibly transformed errors into QML score equations for a Method of Moments
estimator. In this case, we exploit a sub-class of redescending transforms that
includes tail-trimming and functions popular in the robust estimation
literature, and we re-center the transformed errors to minimize small sample
bias. The negligible transforms allow both identification of the true parameter
and asymptotic normality. We present a consistent estimator of the covariance
matrix that permits classic inference without knowledge of the rate of
convergence. A simulation study shows both of our estimators trump existing
ones for sharpness and approximate normality including QML, Log-LAD, and two
types of non-Gaussian QML (Laplace and Power-Law). Finally, we apply the
tail-trimmed QML estimator to financial data.Comment: Published at http://dx.doi.org/10.3150/14-BEJ616 in the Bernoulli
(http://isi.cbs.nl/bernoulli/) by the International Statistical
Institute/Bernoulli Society (http://isi.cbs.nl/BS/bshome.htm
Book Review
Reviewing, Richard A. Posner, Catastrophe: Risk and Response (Oxford University Press, 2004) and Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (Viking, 2005
- âŠ