Equity as a Prerequisite for Stability of Cooperation on Global Public Good Provision

Analysing cooperative provision of a global public good such as climate protection, we explore the relationship between equitable burden sharing on the one hand and core stability on the other. To assess the size of the burden which a public good contribution entails for a country, we make use of a specific measure based on Moulin (Econometrica 55:963-977, 1987). In particular, we show that a Pareto optimal allocation which is not in the core can always be blocked by a group of countries with the highest Moulin sacrifices. In this sense, it is the 'overburdening' and thus 'unfair' treatment of some countries that provides the reason for core instability. By contrast, a Pareto optimal allocation is in the core if the public good contributions are fairly equally distributed according to their Moulin sacrifices. The potential implications of our theoretical analysis for global climate policy are also discussed

Large-Scale Assessment of the Zebrafish Embryo as a Possible Predictive Model in Toxicity Testing

Background: In the drug discovery pipeline, safety pharmacology is a major issue. The zebrafish has been proposed as a model that can bridge the gap in this field between cell assays (which are cost-effective, but low in data content) and rodent assays (which are high in data content, but less cost-efficient). However, zebrafish assays are only likely to be useful if they can be shown to have high predictive power. We examined this issue by assaying 60 water-soluble compounds representing a range of chemical classes and toxicological mechanisms. Methodology/Principal Findings: Over 20,000 wild-type zebrafish embryos (including controls) were cultured individually in defined buffer in 96-well plates. Embryos were exposed for a 96 hour period starting at 24 hours post fertilization. A logarithmic concentration series was used for range-finding, followed by a narrower geometric series for LC 50 determination. Zebrafish embryo LC50 (log mmol/L), and published data on rodent LD50 (log mmol/kg), were found to be strongly correlated (using Kendall’s rank correlation tau and Pearson’s product-moment correlation). The slope of the regression line for the full set of compounds was 0.73403. However, we found that the slope was strongly influenced by compound class. Thus, while most compounds had a similar toxicity level in both species, some compounds were markedly more toxic in zebrafish than in rodents, or vice versa. Conclusions: For the substances examined here, in aggregate, the zebrafish embryo model has good predictivity for toxicit

Coalition Formation and the Ancillary Benefits of Climate Policy

Several studies found ancillary benefits of environmental policy to be of considerable size. These additional private benefits imply not only higher cooperative but also noncooperative abatement targets. However, beyond these largely undisputed important quantitative effects, there are qualitative and strategic implications associated with ancillary benefits: climate policy is no longer a pure but an impure public good. In this paper, we investigate these implications in a setting of non-cooperative coalition formation. In particular, we address the following questions. 1) Do ancillary benefits increase participation in international environmental agreements? 2) Do ancillary benefits raise the success of these treaties in welfare terms