Charles D. Kolstad

Foreign Direct Investment, Exchange Rate Variability and Demand Uncertainty

Variable real exchange rates influence the location of production facilities chosen by a multinational. With risk averse investors and fixed productive factors, parent companies should not be indifferent to production location, even with identical expected costs of production across countries. If a nonnegative correlation exists between export demand and exchange rate shocks, the multinational optimally locates some productive capacity abroad. The capacity share abroad increases as exchange rate volatility rises and becomes more correlated with export demand shocks. These results are confirmed using quarterly U.S. bilateral foreign direct investment flows with Canada, Japan, and the United Kingdom. Copyright 1995 by Economics Department of the University of Pennsylvania and the Osaka University Institute of Social and Economic Research Association.

Do Lax Environmental Regulations Attract Foreign Investment

There has been considerable controversy over the empirical significance of the theoretically predicted pollution haven hypothesis. Generally, empirical papers have failed to find an effect on industrial location of weaker or stricter environmental regulations. In this paper we find confirmation of theoretical predictions. We present a statistical test of the impact of environmental regulations on the capital movement of polluting industries. The empirical study is conducted by examining foreign direct investment (FDI) of several US industries, representing industries with high pollution control costs (chemicals and primary metals) as well as industries with more modest pollution control costs (electrical and non-electrical machinery, transportation equipment, and food products). At issue is the effect of the laxity of environmental regulation on FDI. As laxity is not directly observed, we posit two equations, one for FDI determination and one for pollutant emissions, a variable positively correlated with the unobserved variable. We use aggregate national sulfur emissions as the pollutant. Using instruments for the unobserved variable, the statistical results show that the laxity of environmental regulations in a host country is a significant determinant of FDI from the US for heavily polluting industries and is insignificant for less polluting industries.

Fundamental irreversibilities in stock externalities

Abstract This paper concerns the irreversibility effect in stock externalities. In an environment of uncertainty with learning taking place, one may wish to under-emit today to avoid potential environmental irreversibilities. Alternatively, one may wish to under-invest in pollution control capital, avoiding investments in sunk capital that turn out to be wasted. The paper develops theoretical results on the tension between these two effects and separates risk aversion from the irreversibility effect. The paper also presents a simple example in climate change policy.

Necessary and sufficient conditions for uniqueness of a Cournot equilibrium

In this paper a theorem is developed giving necessary and sufficient conditions for the uniqueness of homogeneous product Cournot equilibria. The result appears to be the strongest to date and the first to involve both necessity and sufficiency. The theorem states than an equilibrium is unique if and only if the determinant of the Jacobian of marginal profits for firms producing positive output is positive at all equilibria. The result applies to the case where profit functions are twice differentiable and pseudoconcave, industry output can be bounded, the above Jacobian is non-singular at equilibria, and marginal profits are strictly negative for non-producing firms. The proof uses fixed point index theory from differential topology.

The Economics of Climate Policy

Economics has played an increasingly important role in shaping policy, in the United States and elsewhere. This chapter reviews some of the dimensions of the economic approach to analyzing, understanding, and developing solutions to the problem of climate change. We then turn to the issue of designing regulatory instruments to control the problem. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the political economy of greenhouse gas control in an international context.

Human-induced climate change: An interdisciplinary assessment

Bringing together many of the world’s leading experts, this volume is a comprehensive, state-of-the-art review of climate change science, impacts, mitigation, adaptation, and policy. It provides an integrated assessment of research on the key topics that underlie current controversial policy questions. The first part of the book addresses recent topics and findings related to the physical–biological earth system, including air pollution–climate interactions, climate interactions with the carbon cycle, and quantitative probability estimates of climate sensitivity and change. The next part of the book surveys estimates of the impacts of climate change for different sectors and regions, describes recent studies for individual sectors, and examines how this research might be used in the policy process. The third part examines current topics related to mitigation of greenhouse gases and explores the potential roles of various technological options that would limit greenhouse-gas emissions and enhance terrestrial carbon sinks. The last part focuses on policy design under uncertainty. Dealing with the scientific, economic, and policy questions at the forefront of the climate change issue, this book will be invaluable for graduate students, researchers, and policymakers interested in all aspects of climate change and the issues that surround it.

Imperfectly Competitive Equilibria in International Commodity Markets

The simple model of perfect competition in spatial markets has been widely applied in analyzing international agricultural trade. Yet, many markets do not appear to be perfectly competitive. In this paper we offer a new and efficient method for computing spatial equilibrium in oligopolistic or oligopsonistic markets. We apply the technique to an analysis of several hypotheses of market conduct in the international wheat market that have been put forward by other authors. We conclude that a Cournot-Nash duopsony model does not perform well in explaining trade.

Derivative evaluation and computational experience with large bilevel mathematical programs

A bilevel program is a mathematical program involving functions defined implicitly as solutions to another mathematical program. We discuss a method for extracting derivative information on the implicit function, which is especially efficient when the lower-level problem has simple bounds on the variables and/or many inactive constraints. Computational experience on problems with up to 230 variables and 30 constraints is presented.

Research Trends and Opportunities in Environmental and Natural Resource Economics

The research questions and topics most likely to emerge in the near term future are assessed. A common theme is that policy issues will be an important driving force, as has generally been true in the past. More specifically, future theoretical advances are expected to occur in the treatment of uncertainty, the incorporation of stock service flows into natural resource analysis, and the incorporation of institutional considerations into models of resource exploitation. Research on valuation is expected to remain vigorous, primarily in the testing of basic assumptions and reconciliation of existing inconsistencies. Opportunities in renewable resource economics center on the incorporation of richer behavioral and technological detail in the general frameworks that already exist. A better understanding of what drives technology, and how environmental agreements can be negotiated and enforced among sovereign nations, are two topics likely to shape future research on global externalities. Finally, questions related to spatial aspects of natural resource use, and matters of land use more generally, seem likely to emerge as important topics on the professions future research agenda.

Uniformity versus differentiation in regulating externalities

Abstract In the regulation of pollutant emissions, a regulator may treat different sources (with different costs and environmental damage) as though they were the same—for institutional, informational, or transaction cost reasons. This may occur despite the efficiency gains from regulatory differentiation of sources. This issue has been a source of much controversy in the environmental economics literature and is examined here from a theoretical perspective. Using a two pollutant economy, emissions and net social benefits are compared for the case of efficient, differentiated regulation and the case of uniform, undifferentiated regulation of the aggregate of the two pollutants. We show when aggregate emissions will be greater than, equal to, or less than efficient emissions and we derive conditions for each of these three possibilities. Further, we show that when marginal costs and benefits become more steeply sloped, the inefficiency associated with undifferentiated regulation increases.