Changing the Rules: How to Get Your Green Job

The planet needs saving, and you need a job. What is your first step? Eban Goodstein, Director of the Bard Center for Environmental Policy, will discuss getting started in a green career, and discuss the “C2C Strategy” to finding the sustainability work you want, in the town where you want to live. Working in small groups, teams work through the strategy process. Each student will head home with a plan to land a job or summer internship, and lay the foundation for a career saving the planet.Participants will be introduced to career tracks in sustainability and fundamental skills for career success, including people asking for stuff, visioning, and persuasive communication. In the workshop, working in teams, students will develop a concrete strategy for finding a green job or sustainability internship in both the field and the geographic area where they want to work

An Initial Estimate of the Cost of Lost Climate Regulation Services Due to Changes in the Arctic Cryosphere

Outlines how arctic sea ice and snow cover help maintain the global climate and ecosystems, the impact of changes in sea and land reflectivity and methane emissions, research on the social cost of carbon, and the estimated economic cost of climate change

Committee Voting Under Alternative Procedures and Preferences: An Experimental Analysis

This paper reports on four series of experiments in a five-person committee voting under majority rule. Each of two voting procedures was paired with each of two types of preference sets. The types were characterized as high or low intensity. Every set of preferences had a Condorcet point and that point was the best alternative for one (and only one) voter. When the high intensity preferences were used, committees operating under either voting procedure selected the Condorcet point more than 90% of the time; when low intensity payoffs were used, the success rate was less than 51%. A theory is suggested which predicts which preference sets should successfully induce selection of the Condorcet point and which should not; in the latter case, the same theory predicts that the choice will be confined to a certain collection f the other points. Our observations are consistent with this theory.Center for Research on Economic and Social Theory, Department of Economics, University of Michiganhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/100940/1/ECON387.pd

Falling margins and rising costs

Price-cost margin, time series, price-rigidity, unit costs,

The Death of the Pigovian Tax? Policy Implications from the Double-Dividend Debate

Recently, economists appear to have abandoned a central precept of environmental policy: optimal environmental taxes are equal to marginal environmental damage (MED). As a consequence of labor market distortions, optimal environmental taxes are now generally argued to typically lie below MED, and given realistic policy constraints on optimal tax reform, sometimes well below MED. This new consensus is reflected in over a dozen papers published without rebuttal in prestigious economics journals, in important survey articles, and in policy-oriented manuscripts. How was it possible that such a radical transformation of economic thinking occurred with essentially no debate in the literature?

Economics and the environment

xiv, 546 hal; 24 c

Two essays in empirical industrial organization: Semiparametric tests of industry structure and accounting for changes in industry profitability.

The first essay develops a method of testing oligopoly behavior that eliminates the need to impose parametric restrictions on technology. Hall's (1988) margin estimation procedure is modified for application at the industry level, and conjectural variations parameters are estimated. These estimates are used to test common hypotheses about oligopoly behavior. Application of the model to the aluminum industry in the early 1980's results in rejection of Bertr and , dominant firm, and defending market share equilibria. Cournot equilibria cannot be rejected for certain ranges of inelastic market dem and . The model is also extended to incorporate biased measurement error, important in industry studies. In the empirical section, it is shown that measurement error bias is significant. Finally, a comparison with parametric estimates suggests that functional form assumptions do matter. The second essay employs a micro-based model of industry behavior to account for changes in the profitability of a sample of eight oligopolistic industries from 1958 to 1982. I find that profit rates in five of the industries declined sharply over the period. Competitive factors, including (1) slower market growth which lead to heightened domestic competition, and (2) declining relative import prices, exerted a constant, modest downward pressure on profit rates. Increasing unit costs were not important early in the period but became a dominant factor in the 1970's. Finally, residual factors, termed a "dem and -capacity imbalance", were also important in explaining the fall in profitability. In addition to analyzing profit rate declines, the essay includes time series estimates of price-cost margin (PCM) equations for individual industries. Employing this original approach, I find that real unit costs and market growth rates provide consistent and significant power in explaining PCM levels, but that the coefficients on concentration ratios, import shares, capital-sales ratios, and cyclical indicators often have the "wrong" sign, or are insignificant. The importance of market growth is consistent with recent theoretical literature highlighting the impact that dem and conditions have on the maintenance of tacit collusive agreements.Ph.D.EconomicsCommerce-BusinessEconomic theoryUniversity of Michiganhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/162453/1/9013909.pd