Structural Change and Environmental Kuznets Curves

Household Production and Environmental Kuznets Curves

This paper provides a theoretical explanation for the widely debated empirical finding of “Environmental Kuznets Curves”, i.e., U-shaped relationships between per-capita income and indicators of environmental quality. We present a household-production model in which the degradation of environmental quality is a by-product of household activities. Households can not directly purchase environment...

Are Environmental Kuznets Curves Misleading Us?

Endowments, Preferences, Abatement and Voting: Microfoundations of Environmental Kuznets Curves

Will economic growth inevitably degrade the environment, throughout development? This paper presents a simple household-choice framework that emphasizes the tradeoff between pollution-causing consumption and pollution-reducing abatement expenditures. The framework yields a simple explanation for Environmental Kuznets Curves (EKCs, i.e. non-monotonic, upward-turning paths of environment while de...

Environmental Kuznets curves: Bayesian evidence from switching regime models

The purpose of the paper is to test empirically the existence of an environmental Kuznets Ž . curve EKC , using switching regime models along with cross-sectional data and Bayesian Markov chain Monte Carlo methods to perform the computations. The models are based on the normal and Student’s t distributions. These methods allow us to present exact, finitesample posterior distributions of switchi...

Interpreting Estimated Environmental Kuznets Curves for Greenhouse Gases

This paper examines the question of how to interpret a relationship between income and carbon emissions in a country (the environmental Kuznets curve – EKC -for carbon). A very simple and graphical structural model of an EKC is developed and the problems of applying the concept to carbon are discussed. A major issue is the weak link between demand to avoid damage from climate change and regulat...