Economic structure, development policy and environmental quality : an empirical analysis of environmental Kuznets curves with Chinese municipal data

In many cases, the relationship between environmental pollution and economic development can be generally depicted by an inverted U-shaped curve, or an environmental Kuznets curve, where pollution increases with income at the beginning and decreases after a certain level of income. However, what determine the shape of an enviornmental Kuznets curve, such as the height and the turning point of the curve, have not been thoroughly studied. A good understanding of the determinants is vitally important to the development community, especially for the developing world, where income growth is a high priority and yet environmental pollution also needs to be carefully controlled. This study analyzes the impacts of economic structure, development strategy and environmental regulation on the shape of the environmental Kuznets curve with a city-level panel dataset obtained from China. The results show that economic structure, development strategy and environmental regulation can all have important implications on the relationship between environmental environmental quality and economic development but the impacts can be different at different development stages.Environmental Economics&Policies,Economic Theory&Research,Emerging Markets,Population Policies,Green Issues

Optimal Dynamic rading Strategies with Risk Limits

Value at Risk (VaR) has emerged in recent years as a standard tool to measure and control the risk of trading portfolios.Yet,existing theoretical analyses of the optimal behavior of a trader subject to VaR limits have produced a negative view of VaR as a risk-control tool. In particular,VaR limits have been found to induce increased risk exposure in some states and an increased probability of extreme losses. However, these conclusions are based on models that are either static or dynamically inconsistent. In this paper we formulate a dynamically consistent model of optimal portfolio choice subject to VaR limits and show that the conclusions of earlier papers are incorrect if, consistently with common practice,the portfolio VaR is reevaluated dynamically making use of available conditioning information. In particular, we ?nd that the risk exposure of a trader subject to a VaR limit is always lower than that of an unconstrained trader and that the probability of extreme losses is also lower.We also consider risk limits formulated in terms of Tail Conditional Expectation (TCE),a coherent risk measure often advocated as an alternative to VaR,and show that in our dynamic setting it is always possible to transform a TCE limit into an equivalent VaR limit,and conversely.