Tradable Pollution Permits and the Regulatory Game

This paper analyzes polluters\u27 incentives to move from a traditional command and control (CAC) environmental regulatory regime to a tradable permits (TPP) regime. Existing work in environmental economics does not model how firms contest and bargain over actual regulatory implementation in CAC regimes, and therefore fail to compare TPP regimes with any CAC regime that is actually observed. This paper models CAC environmental regulation as a bargaining game over pollution entitlements. Using a reduced form model of the regulatory contest, it shows that CAC regulatory bargaining likely generates a regulatory status quo under which firms with the highest compliance costs bargain for the smallest pollution reductions, or even no reduction at all. As for a tradable permits regime, it is shown that all firms are better off under such a regime than they would be under an idealized CAC regime that set and enforced a uniform pollution standard, but permit sellers (low compliance cost firms) may actually be better off under a TPP regime with relaxed aggregate pollution levels. Most importantly, because high cost firms (or facilities) are the most weakly regulated in the equilibrium under negotiated or bargained CAC regimes, they may be net losers in a proposed move to a TPP regime. When equilibrium costs under a TPP regime are compared with equilibrium costs under a status quo CAC regime, several otherwise paradoxical aspects of firm attitudes toward TPP type reforms can be explained. In particular, the otherwise paradoxical pattern of allowances awarded under Phase II of the 1990 Clean Air Act\u27s acid rain program, a pattern tending to favor (in Phase II) cleaner, newer generating units, is explained by the fact that under the status quo regime, a kind of bargained CAC, it was the newer cleaner units that were regulated, and which therefore had higher marginal control costs than did the largely unregulated older, plants. As a normative matter, the analysis here implies that the proper baseline for evaluating TPP regimes such as those contained in the Bush Administration\u27s recent Clear Skies initiative is not idealized, but nonexistent CAC regulatory outcomes, but rather the outcomes that have resulted from the bargaining game set up by CAC laws and regulations

Rapid wide-field heterodyne interferometry with custom 2D CMOS camera

© The Institution of Engineering and Technology 2015. A wide-field pseudo-heterodyne interference contrast microscope is described, which employs a complementary metal-oxide semiconductor (CMOS) phase-sensitive camera. The use of multiple wells in the camera enables extremely rapid measurement of a full phase field at high resolution and the modulation frequency is not limited by the camera frame rate. The high data acquisition frequency allows the effects of microphonics to be frozen to mitigate the effect of lowfrequency disturbance

"Feed from the Service": Corruption and Coercion in the State-University Relations in Central Eurasia

Education in Central Eurasia has become one of the industries, most affected by corruption. Corruption in academia, including bribery, extortions, embezzlement, nepotism, fraud, cheating, and plagiarism, is reflected in the region’s media and addressed in few scholarly works. This paper considers corruption in higher education as a product of interrelations between the government and academia. A substantial block of literature considers excessive corruption as an indicator of a weak state. In contrast to standard interpretations, this paper argues that in non-democratic societies corruption is used on a systematic basis as a mechanism of direct and indirect administrative control over higher education institutions. Informal approval of corrupt activities in exchange for loyalty and compliance with the regime may be used in the countries of Central Eurasia for the purposes of political indoctrination. This paper presents the concept of corruption and coercion in the state-university relations in Central Eurasia and outlines the model which incorporates this concept and the “feed from the service” approach. It presents implications of this model for the state-university relations and the national educational systems in Central Eurasia in general and offers some suggestions on curbing corruption

Neural crest derivatives in ocular development: Discerning the eye of the storm

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/111961/1/bdrc21095.pd