Empirical Tests Of The Pollution Haven Hypothesis When Environmental Regulation Is Endogenous

The pollution haven hypothesis (PHH) posits that production within polluting industries will shift to locations with lax environmental regulation. While straightforward, the existing empirical literature is inconclusive owing to two shortcomings. First, unobserved heterogeneity and measurement error are typically ignored due to the lack of a credible, traditional instrumental variable for regulation. Second, geographic spillovers have not been adequately incorporated into tests of the PHH. We overcome these issues utilizing two novel identification strategies within a model incorporating spillovers. Using US state-level data, own environmental regulation negatively impacts inbound foreign direct investment. Moreover, endogeneity is both statistically and economically relevant

Energy Efficiency And Exporting: Evidence From Firm-Level Data

While exporting firms and non-exporters have been compared across several dimensions, empirical comparisons on the basis of environmental performance are relatively few. Moreover, analyzing the environmental implications of firm-level exports is not trivial due to non-random selection into exporting. In this light, we examine the impact of exporting on firms' energy efficiency by resorting to an instrumental variables strategy based on a differencing approach (Pitt and Rosenzweig, 1990). Utilizing data from Indonesia, we find (i) exporting to reduce the use of fuels (relative to electricity) and (ii) concerns over endogeneity of exporting status to be relevant

Is the WTO mystery really solved?

The WTO’s impact on bilateral trade remains puzzling due, in part, to previous studies’ failure to simultaneously address three issues: inclusion of zero trade, proper controls for multilateral resistance, and proper membership definition. Addressing all fails to suggest a positive effect

Do Customs Union Members Engage in More Bilateral Trade than Free-Trade Agreement Members?

This paper provides the first empirical analysis directly comparing the effects of customs unions (CUs) and free-trade agreements (FTAs) on members’ bilateral trade, while addressing the biases arising from loglinearization of the gravity model and crucial time-invariant unobservables. Since Fiorentino et al. (2007) question the popularity of CUs relative to FTAs, considering the latter to be more practical in the current trading climate, such a comparison seems especially relevant. While Baier and Bergstrand (2007) find an FTA to approximately double members’ bilateral trade after 10 years, the results of this paper find CUs to have had a much larger impact than FTAs

Multilateral Environmental Agreements And The WTO

Addressing many environmental problems requires international cooperation. However, rules under the World Trade Organization (WTO) may deter participation in multilateral environmental agreements. Using a partial identification approach, we obtain strictly negative bounds for non-OECD countries in the WTO era

Design of a cost effective battery-supercapacitor hybrid energy storage system for hourly dispatching solar PV power

This study aims to develop a low cost energy storage system for hourly dispatching solar photovoltaic (PV) power for 1MW grid connected PV array. To fulfill this objective, the optimum (most economical) scaling of a battery and supercapacitor (SC) hybrid storage is developed based on the time constant of a low pass filter (LPF) that is used to allocate the power between a battery and SC. Based on the battery state of charge (SOC), rule based algorithms are developed to estimate the perfect grid reference power for each one-hour dispatching period. Another rule-based algorithm is implemented to keep the battery SOC within a certain limit that helps to increase the battery lifetime. An economic comparison of different kinds of battery and SC combination in hybrid energy storage system (HESS) is presented in this research. This study also considers the relationship between the actual PV cell temperature and the ambient temperature and presents their effects on energy storage price calculations. This study uses actual solar data of four different days recorded at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in MATLAB/Simulink environment simulations to get the better picture about annual energy storage cost for hourly dispatching solar power. According to the results, the HESS combination of li-ion battery and SC, outperforms a battery only or lead acid and SC combination in HESS operation regardless of temperature framework

Engenderneered Machines in Science Fiction Film

The fear that human creations might backfire and attack their creators has been a mainstay of science fiction at least since Mary Shelley?s Frankenstein. The misgivings become particularly acute when human-engineered imitations of human beings (i.e., robots and cyborgs) raise questions regarding how humans can be distinguished from machines. Assumptions about gender also infuse the ways humans conceive and react to their mechanical progeny (i.e., robots and cyborgs). Whenever human-like creations are embodied, they encounter the fundamental bodily quality of sexuality. The cinematic exploration "fleshes out" how posthuman technological innovations are engendered in their engineering. By problematizing the roles that gender can play in the very conceptions of what counts as human or machine, gender constructions infuse technological innovation in various challenging ways. "Engenderneering" may be understood as the construction or interpretation of a gender- neutral object so that its gender becomes part of its essence. This personification, far from merely personifying an object, engenders the object by making gender roles and expectations central to how humans interact with non-human (usually also interpreted as less-than-human) entities. For example, ships have been christened traditionally as female, the reliable (i.e., motherly) bearers that keep passengers afloat upon the amniotic oceans. Gender is already so intertwined with human experience that the terra "engender"—aside from its intransitive sense of attributing sexual identity—acquires its primary meaning as a synonym for creation itself. Anna Balsamo (1996) laments that new technologies such as virtual reality simply "reproduce, in high-tech guise, traditional narratives about the gendered, race-marked body" (132). In the case of science fiction films, the project of engenderneering is rarely innovative. Instead, the emergence of new machines and forms of life leave basically intact the familiar stories of "proper" feminine roles

Rhetoric and Risk

The discoveries of science and technology are accelerating. The choice of how to regulate and react to scientific and technological innovations relies heavily on the notion of risk. The emergence nature contemporary science and technology (i.e., complex systems that are not reducible to the simple physical and chemical processes from which they arose) confounds risk studies (Goodenough & Deacon, 2006). Indeed, whether to embark on a particular path of scientific inquiry or proceed with a technological development depends on the ability to calculate the amount of risk associated with the endeavor. We are, however, ill-equipped to resolve the demands of risk analysis with certainty

A Car of Her Own: Volvo’s “Your Concept Car” as a Vehicle for Feminism?

This essay probes the ambiguities surrounding [Volvo’s] Your Concept Car on several levels. First, we explain how YCC configures women as creators and consumers. Second, we discuss discursive patterns arising in media coverage of the car. We find a frequent tendency to “domesticate” the women designers and consumers by using terminology that places the automobile within the realm of household activities, thereby relegating women to their “proper” role of homemaker and caretaker for others. Third, we place YCC in the broader context of repressive tolerance, showing how the emergence of woman-powered automotive design can marginalize the very constituencies it purportedly promotes. The discursive framing of YCC not only reinforces patriarchal restrictions on the “proper” sphere of women’s knowledge and activities, but shows how women can become complicitous in their own oppression through the discursive choices they make. The decidedly mixed messages YCC sends reflect the complexity accompanying social projects that purportedly elevate the social and economic status of women

Beyond Consumerism and Utopianism: How Service Learning Contributes to Liberal Arts Ideals

The authors place service learning within the liberal arts tradition of empowering others to help themselves. Such a contextualization supplements visions of students as consumers or customers and education as a means to gain economic advantage in a competitive market. Their attention then turns to how even well-intentioned service-learning projects might be co-opted in ways that foster community dependence on the services offered. Effectively designed service-learning programs should offer a broad range of opportunities for social activism while encouraging critical reflection about the applicability of market-derived educational philosophies