Climate and Energy Crises from the Perspective of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change: Trade‐Offs between Systemic Transition and Societal Collapse?

AR6 IPCC reports give divergent messages about the different socio‐economic transition approaches to deal with the current climate emergency. The dangers of not giving a clear message to policymakers and to society on the need of changing the current socio‐economic paradigm are considerable: to fall in the SSP3‐7.0 scenario, which is conducive to the collapse of our current civi‐ lization. In this work, key variables to assess the main functionalities of global socio‐economy are analyzed under a system dynamics approach. This allows for understanding what the evolution is of our current socio‐economy in a framework of climate change and resource depletion. The aim of this work is to provide a different perspective on socio‐economic evolution by identifying similar characteristics in the worst‐case IPCC scenarios with historical behavior in complex societies. From such a historical perspective and the current system evolution, a conceptual model is proposed to explain our globalized complex system near to a phase transition. Then, phase transition corre‐ spondences from the model to the current socio‐economic system are proposed and a series of cor‐ responding preventive measures (in terms of social actions, economic measures, and their linked policies) are suggested to avoid collapse scenarios

Tax differentials and agglomeration economies in intraregional firm location

This paper analyses empirically how differences in local taxes affect the intraregional location of new manufacturing plants. These effects are examined within the random profit maximization framework while accounting for the presence of different types of agglomeration economies (localization/ urbanization/ Jacobs’ economies) at the municipal level. We look at the location decision of more than 10,000 establishments locating between 1996 and 2003 across more than 400 municipalities in Catalonia, a Spanish region. It is necessary to restrict the choice set to the local labor market and, above all, to control for agglomeration economies so as to identify the effects of taxes on the location of new establishments.Local taxes, Agglomeration economies, Firm location.

Which Communities should be afraid of Mobility? The Effects of Agglomeration Economies on the Sensitivity of Firm Location to Local Taxes

This paper examines the effects of agglomeration economies (AE) on the sensitivity of firm location to tax differentials. An initial reading of the story suggests that, with AE, when a firm moves into a community attracted by a tax reduction, other firms may decide to move in as well. This suggests that AE increase the sensitivity of firm location to local taxes. However, a second version of the story reads that, if economic activities are highly concentrated in space, AE might offset any tax differential, hence suggesting a reduction in this sensitivity. This paper provides a theoretical model of intraregional firm location with Marshallian AE that is able to generate both hypotheses: AE increase (decrease) the effect of taxes when locations are (are not) of a similar size. We then use Spanish municipal data for the period 1995-2002 to test these hypotheses, analyzing the combined effect of local business taxes and Marshallian AE on the intraregional location of employment. In line with the theory, a municipality with stronger AE experiences lower (higher) tax effects if it is sufficiently dissimilar (similar) to its neighbors in terms of size.local taxes, agglomeration economies, local employment growth, instrumental variables

RACIONALIDAD DE LAS PREVISIONES PRESUPUESTARIAS Y COMPORTAMIENTO ESTRATÉGICO. EL CASO ESPAÑOL

Este trabajo considera la calidad de las previsiones de las principales partidas de ingresos y gastos contempladas en los Presupuestos Generales del Estado desde la perspectiva de su racionalidad. En primer lugar, el trabajo estudia si las previsiones están sesgadas –i.e., si los errores de previsión son sistemáticamente positivos o negativos– y si son eficientes –i.e., los errores son debidos a una utilización deficiente de la información disponible durante la fase de elaboración–. En segundo lugar, se analiza la posibilidad de que la falta de racionalidad de las previsiones presupuestarias se derive de un comportamiento estratégico por parte del gobierno. La metodología utilizada para contrastar las diferentes hipótesis planteadas en el trabajo se basa en la aplicación, además de los procedimientos aplicados habitualmente en la literatura, de técnicas no paramétricas, que permiten soslayar la dificultad que entraña el disponer de un número limitado de observaciones de las diferentes variables consideradas en el análisis. Classification-JEL : E62, H77presupuestos, previsiones de ingresos y gastos, racionalidad

‘Hold that ghost’: using notches to identify manipulation of population-based grants

We study local government incentives to misreport the information required to implement a formula grant. We focus specifically on population, in theory the easiest variable for the grantor to verify. We analyze the Spanish case and show how a switch from the use of census to registered population data (the latter administered by the municipalities) led to a manipulation of the population numbers used by central government to allocate grants to municipalities. As a result, registers included a proportion of ‘ghost’ citizens, that is, people who presented no trace of actually residing in the municipality. We identify the effects of grants on population over-reporting taking profit of notches in the grant scheme (i.e., one based on weighted population with the weights increasing at specific population thresholds). We document an excess mass of municipalities to the right of the notch threshold and a density hole to the left of it. There are several indications that manipulation (rather than real population responses) is the mechanism at work

'Ghost citizens': Using notches to identify manipulation of population-based grants

This paper analyzes how local governments misreport population figures to obtain higher per capita grant allocations. In 1998, the allocation of a formula based grant in Spain switched from using the centrally administered census to local population registers administered by municipalities. The value of this per capita grant changes at fixed population thresholds for the entire local population. We exploit these notches to analyze the size distribution of municipalities to detect deliberate manipulation of the grant-assignment variable. This allows us to causally identify the effect of grant generosity on population over-reporting. We document an excess mass of municipalities to the right of the notch threshold and a density hole to the left of it: local registers included a proportion of 'ghost citizens', that is, people who presented no trace of actually residing in the municipalities which benefit the most from inflating population figures to pass the relevant threshold. We document that manipulation (rather than real population responses) is the mechanism at work. The main channel behind manipulation is the incorrect treatment of foreign residents to inflate total local population. (C) 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved

Which communities should be afraid of mobility? The effects of agglomeration economies on the sensitivity of firm location to local taxes

This paper examines the effects of agglomeration economies (AE) on the sensitivity of firm location to tax differentials. An initial reading of the story suggests that, with AE, when a firm moves into a community attracted by a tax reduction, other firms may decide to move in as well. This suggests that AE increase the sensitivity of firm location to local taxes. However, a second version of the story reads that, if economic activities are highly concentrated in space, AE might offset any tax differential, hence suggesting a reduction in this sensitivity. This paper provides a theoretical model of intraregional firm location with Marshallian AE that is able to generate both hypotheses: AE increase (decrease) the effect of taxes when locations are (are not) of a similar size. We then use Spanish municipal data for the period 1995-2002 to test these hypotheses, analyzing the combined effect of local business taxes and Marshallian AE on the intraregional location of employment. In line with the theory, a municipality with stronger AE experiences lower (higher) tax effects if it is sufficiently dissimilar (similar) to its neighbors in terms of size

PySD: System Dynamics Modeling in Python

System Dynamics (SD) is a mathematical approach used to describe and simulate the dynamics of complex systems over time. The foundations of the methodology were laid in the 1950s by Professor Jay W. Forrester of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Forrester, 1971). The building blocks of SD models are stocks, flows, variables, parameters, and lookup tables. Stocks represent cumulative quantities which take a certain value at each moment in time (integral), and flows are the rates at which those quantities change per unit of time (derivative). Variables express intermediate calculations, parameters set external conditions for the simulation, and lookup tables are single-valued functions that accept another model component as an argument. These components can combine to create feedback loops in which the state of the stock variables feeds back to influence flows in the model. The relationships between these model components can be represented using causal loop diagrams, see Figure 1

Tax differentials and agglomeration economies in intraregional firm location

This paper analyses empirically how differences in local taxes affect the intraregional location of new manufacturing plants. These effects are examined within the random profit maximization framework while accounting for the presence of different types of agglomeration economies (localization/ urbanization/ Jacobs' economies) at the municipal level. We look at the location decision of more than 10,000 establishments locating between 1996 and 2003 across more than 400 municipalities in Catalonia, a Spanish region. It is necessary to restrict the choice set to the local labor market and, above all, to control for agglomeration economies so as to identify the effects of taxes on the location of new establishments.Este artículo analiza a nivel empírico el papel de los impuestos locales en la localización intra-regional de nuevos establecimientos manufactureros. Estos efectos son analizados en un modelo de maximización aleatoria de beneficios "random profit maximization", teniendo en cuenta la presencia de distintas economías de aglomeración (localización/ urbanización/ Jacobs) a nivel municipal. En concreto, estudiamos la decisión de localización de más de 10.000 nuevos establecimientos manufactureros, que se establecen en más 400 municipios de la región española de Cataluña. Para identificar el efecto de los impuestos locales en la localización de los nuevos establecimientos es preciso restringir el conjunto de elección al mercado de trabajo local y, sobretodo, controlar la presencia de economías de aglomeración