On the theory of a firm : The case of by-production of emissions.

Five attributes of emission generating technologies are identified and a concept of byproduction is introduced, which implies these five attributes. Murty and Russell [2010] characterization of technologies, which requires distinguishing between intended production of firms and nature's laws of emission generation, is shown to be both necessary and sufficient for by-production. While intended production could be postulated to satisfy standard input and output free-disposability, these will necessarily be violated by nature's emission generation mechanism, which satisfies costly disposability of emission as defined in Murty [2010]. Marginal technical and economic costs of abatement are derived for technologies exhibiting by-production. A simple model of by-production illustrates that, while common abatement paths considered in the literature do involve a technological trade off between emission reduction and intended production, there also almost always exist abatement paths where it is possible to have both geater emission reductions and greater intended outputs. Further, marginal abatement costs will usually be decreasing in the initial level of emissions of firms. Counterintuitive as these results may sound in the rst instance, they are intuitively obvious in the by-production approach as it is rich enough to incorporate both standard economic assumptions with respect to intended production of firms and the rules of nature that govern emission generation.theory of a firm ; technology ; input and output free-disposability ; diminishing returns to inputs ; joint production ; emission-generation ; marginal abatement cost

The Theory of By-Production of Emissions and Capital-Constrained Non-Cooperative Nash Outcomes of a Global Economy

The reduced form approaches that are commonly adopted in the literature to model emission-generating technologies (EGTs) do not distinguish between emission-causing and non-emission causing goods in production. We provide a new set of axioms to describe EGTs. Technologies that satisfy these axioms are called by-production technologies (BPTs). A distance function representation of BPTs is derived and it is shown that a BPT can be decomposed into a standard neo-classical intended-production technology and nature's emission-generation set (the relationship in nature between emissions and emission-causing goods). As an illustrative application of the BP approach, we study cross-country differences in emission levels due to cross-country di erences in capital endowments at a noncooperative Nash equilibrium, where emissions impose both local and global externalities. The change in emission levels as we move from capital-poor to capital-rich countries is decomposed into income and substitution e ects. The latter are a result of changes in the trade-off between intended-production and emission-generation, which is attributed to diminishing returns to emission-causing inputs or cleaning-up activities, while the nature of the former is governed by the assumption that emission is an inferior good. The implications of increasing returns to capital, substitutability or complementarity between capital and emission-causing inputs such as fuels, extraction costs of fuels, and inter-fuel substitution in production are studied and a set of conditions that result in an environmental Kuznets curve is derived.distance function representation of multi-output technology, emission-generating technologies, free and costly disposability, environmental Kuznets curve, environmental externalities, non-cooperative Nash equilibrium, income and substitution effects, inferior good, returns to scale, inter-fuel substitution.

Topology of utility possibility frontiers of economies with Ramsey taxation

This paper establishes the generic size and structure of the second-best Pareto frontier and its various components in private ownership economies with Ramsey taxation. It provides conditions under which the second-best Pareto frontier of an economy with H consumers will have the expected structure of a H . 1-dimensional manifold. In a class of economies, it shows that, generically, while the jointly production and consumption ine cient component of the second-best Pareto manifold is a submanifold that also has a dimension equal to H . 1, the production e cient, consumption e cient, and the rstbest components are lower dimensional, and hence negligible in size, submanifolds. Thus, it formally demonstrates that the economies usually studied in the literature, where all second-best are production e cient, are extremely rare. Market prices cannot be used in lieu of social shadow prices in most economies for cost-bene t tests. This begs further research for recovering the true social shadow prices from the data in such economies.Ramsey taxation ; second-best ; production e ciency ; general equilibrium ; private ownership ; di erential topology ; transversality theorem.

Constraints on profit income distribution and production efficiency in private ownership economies with Ramsey taxation

In economies with Ramsey taxation, decreasing returns to scale, and private ownership, we show that second-best production efficiency is desirable when profit tax rates vary across groups of firms provided that the institutional rules which define profit incomes of consumers depend on the distribution of profits across these groups of firms. The classic results of Dasgupta and Stiglitz [1972] (of firm-specific profit taxation) and Diamond and Mirrlees [1971] and Guesnerie [1995] (of uniform one-hundred percent profit taxation) follow as special cases of our model. Moreover, second-best analysis suggests the desirability of proportionate taxation of inter-firm transactions in the absence of profit taxes. Alternatively, it recommends profit taxation as a perfect substitute for intermediate-input taxation. The analysis also suggests that, combined with the knowledge of the distribution of profit incomes in the economy, profit taxation can promote both efficiency and redistributive objectives of the government.Ramsey taxation, private ownership, prot taxation, production ineciency, general equilibrium.

Constraints on income distribution and production efficiency in economies with Ramsey Taxation

We study the link between second-best production efficiency and the constraints on income distribution imposed by private ownership of firms in economies with Ramsey taxation. We review the result of Dasgupta and Stiglitz [1972], Mirrlees [1972], Hahn [1973], and Sadka [1977] about firm-specific profit taxation leading to second-best production efficiency. Problems in the proofs of this result in these papers have been identified by Reinhorn [2005]. We provide an alternative, and with some hope a more intuitive, proof of this result. The mechanism employed in our proof is also used to show second-best production efficiency under some configuarations of private ownership without any (or at best, uniform) profit taxation. The results obtained raise questions about the genericity of the phenomenon of second-best production inefficiency and about recovering social shadow prices in such economies

Analysing pedagogical change: Physics teachers' responses to a new curriculum.

This paper describes teachers' attempts to implement the 1994 New Zealand physics curriculum in the first year of its introduction to secondary schools in 1998. Analysis of interviews with 10 physics teachers and the three curriculum writers led to the identification of a number of barriers to changes in pedagogical practices. The barriers identified aligned with factors that had been identified by other researchers as important influences on teachers undergoing change. It is argued that a sociocultural perspective suggests that there were three main reasons why significant pedagogical change was not occasioned by the curriculum document. Firstly, there was very limited knowledge about why changes were being implemented. Secondly, there was little social and system support for the curriculum change. Finally, teachers had no time to focus on and reflect on the change

Unit Versus Ad Valorem Taxes : Monopoly In General Equilibrium

We show that if a monopoly sector is imbedded in a general equilibrium framework and profits are taxed at one hundred percent, then unit (specific) taxation and ad valorem taxation are welfare-wise equivalent. This is contrary to all known claims.Ad valorem taxes ; unit taxes ; monopoly

Unit Versus Ad Valorem Taxes: The Private Ownership of Monopoly In General Equilibrium

Employing a general equilibrium framework, Blackorby and Murty [2007] prove that, with a monopoly and under one hundred percent profit taxation and uniform lump-sum transfers, the utility possibility sets of economies with unit and ad valorem taxes are identical. This welfare-equivalence is in contrast to most previous studies, which demonstrate the superiority of the ad valorem tax in a partial equilibrium framework. In this paper we relax the assumption of one hundred percent profit taxation and allow the consumers to receive profit incomes from ownership of shares in the monopoly firm. We find that, under certain regularity conditions, for any fixed vector of profit shares, the utility possibility sets of economies with unit and ad valorem taxes are not generally identical. But it does not imply that one completely dominates the other. Rather, the two utility possibility frontiers cross each other. Additionally, employing a standard partial equilibrium welfare analysis, we show that the Marshallian social surpluses resulting from the two tax structures are identical when the government can implement unrestricted transfers.Ad Valorem taxes, unit taxes, monopoly, private ownership economy, general equilibrium, second-best Pareto optimality.

Constraints on Income Distribution and Production Efficiency In Economies with Ramsey Taxation

We study the link between second-best production efficiency and the constraints on income distribution imposed by private ownership of firms in economies with Ramsey taxation. We review the result of Dasgupta and Stiglitz [1972], Mirrlees [1972], Hahn [1973], and Sadka [1977] about firm-specific profit taxation leading to second-best production efficiency. Problems in the proofs of this result in these papers have been identified by Reinhorn [2005]. We provide an alternative, and with some hope a more intuitive, proof of this result. The mechanism employed in our proof is also used to show second-best production efficiency under some configuarations of private ownership without any (or at best, uniform) profit taxation. The results obtained raise questions about the genericity of the phenomenon of second-best production inefficiency and about recovering social shadow prices in such economies.Ramsey taxation ; production inefficiency ; general equilibrium ; private ownership

On modeling pollution-generating technologies

We distinguish between intended production and residual generation and introduce the concept of by-production. We show that by-production provides the fundamental explanation for the positive correlation that is observed between intended production and residual generation. Most of the existing literature attributes the observed positive correlation to abatement options available to firms. We show that abatement options of firms add to the phenomenon of by-production in strengthening the observed positive correlation. The existing literature usually does not explicitly model abatement options of firms, but considers a reduced form of he technology, which satisfies standard disposability assumptions with respect to all inputs and intended outputs. We show that more than one implicit production relation is needed to capture all the technological trade-offs that are implied by by-production. From our model, we are able to derive a reduced form of the technology that is in the spirit of the one that is usually studied in the literature. However, we nd that our reduced form technology violates standard disposability with respect to inputs and intended outputs that cause pollution. We derive implications from the phenomenon of by-production for the econometric and Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) speci cations of pollution-generating technologies. We derive a DEA specification of technologies that satisfy by-production. Such a specification can be used to study issues relating to measurement of efficiency, marginal abatement costs, productivity, etc., of firms with technologies that generate pollution. JEL Codes: D20 ; D24 ; D62 ; Q50pollution-generating technologies ; free disposability ; weak disposability ; data envelope analysis ; technical efficiency measurement