Environmental Compliance by Firms in the Manufacturing Sector in Mexico

To date, little empirical evidence exists to help regulators understand why some firms comply even when there is little financial incentive to do so and others continually violate environmental regulations. This paper examines data on compliance with environmental regulations within the manufacturing sector in Mexico. The probability of complying depends, among other factors, on the kind of management practices of the firm and the level of environmental training. Some firms in the manufacturing sector over-comply with regulations. Our results show that providing environmental training to employees in the firm increases the probability of over-compliance. Local community has a positive impact on over-compliance however the magnitude of its impact is not as strong as is often suggested in the literature.Environmental regulation, Compliance, Mexico

Impact of Watershed Development Projects on Seasonal Livestock Migration — A Study on Shivalik Foothill Villages in Haryana

Seasonal migration of pastoral nomads, which constitutes a major proportion of human population in the Shivalik foothill villages in the Haryana state, is being practised since long in the region. To a large extent, these movements are associated with the absence of water resources development in the water-scarce regions. The present paper has examined the impact of watershed development programmes on seasonal livestock migration and has investigated the determinants of likelihood of such types of migration. The results have revealed that though the watershed development projects have helped in improving the productivity of agricultural land, the same gains are still to be realized on common lands because small and landless families entirely depend on common lands for livestock rearing. Evidence has shown that market access defines the degree of livestock exploitation and there is enormous scope for improving the effectiveness through focused interventionsAgricultural and Food Policy,

Formal Verification of Full-Wave Rectifier: A Case Study

We present a case study of formal verification of full-wave rectifier for analog and mixed signal designs. We have used the Checkmate tool from CMU [1], which is a public domain formal verification tool for hybrid systems. Due to the restriction imposed by Checkmate it necessitates to make the changes in the Checkmate implementation to implement the complex and non-linear system. Full-wave rectifier has been implemented by using the Checkmate custom blocks and the Simulink blocks from MATLAB from Math works. After establishing the required changes in the Checkmate implementation we are able to efficiently verify the safety properties of the full-wave rectifier.Comment: The IEEE 8th International Conference on ASIC (IEEE ASICON 2009), October 20-23 2009, Changsha, Chin

Impact of Risk and Uncertainty in the Provision of Local and Global Environmental Goods : An Experimental Analysis

Uncertainties and risks in the decision making process are abundant in the area of environmental economics, irrespective of whether the problems being discussed are local or global. This paper uses laboratory evidence from public goods games to examine how in payoff equivalent situations, decision makers contribute towards local or global environmental goods, in the presence of risk and uncertainties in the provision of these goods. We use a within subject design that allows for comparisons across seven different treatments in which subjects are exposed to internal (strategic) and external (environmental) risk and uncertainty. Our results show that the location of the risk and uncertainty matters, with subjects moving away from the external uncertainty in favor of internal uncertainty, when that uncertainty is associated with the local environmental good. When the uncertainty relates to the global environmental good, subjects face both external and internal uncertainty on the same good leading to a significant drop in contributions. We find that in the presence of risk and uncertainty subjects use feedback from other members of their group when deciding about future contributions. The reward for research and development and innovation is captured in the experimental design by the increased probability of obtaining the desired outcome in the endogenous probability treatment. Subjects seem to understand this incentive and contribute more towards global goods in this treatment.Experiments, Public Goods, Local and Global Environmental Problems, Risk, Uncertainty.

Does the Size of the Action Set Matter for Coorperation

We use the voluntary contribution mechanism to investigate whether smaller action sets lead to higher cooperation rates. We ?nd that this is the case for groups of four players.action set; voluntary contribution mechanism; prisoner?s dilemma

Gender Differences in Trust and Reciprocity

We use the investment game introduced by Berg, Dickhaut and McCabe (1995) to explore gender differences in trust and reciprocity. In doing so we replicate and extend the results first reported by Croson and Buchan (1999). We find that men exhibit greater trust than women do while women show higher levels of reciprocity. Trusting behavior is driven strongly by expectations of reciprocation. We posit that the lower levels of trust exhibited by women may be attributed to a higher degree of risk aversion.Gender Differences, Trust, Reciprocity, Risk Aversion, Experiments