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Awarding Certified Emission Reductions to Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) projects under the Kyoto Protocol involves comparing the actual emissions of the project to a counterfactual "baseline" emissions level. The baseline of a project is intended to represent the emissions that would have occurred in the absence of the project. Accordingly, there is a high degree of uncertainty in determining CDM baselines. In the years since the emergence of the CDM, scientific and political debates have occurred about how best to cut through this uncertainty and arrive at the fixed, quantitative figures necessary for the quantification and commodification of greenhouse gas emissions. My research explores the decision-making process by which practical quantifying conventions are adopted in order to narrow the operational realm of uncertainty. It focuses on the role of scientists and the use of scientific rhetoric in the negotiation process and also explores risk and the perceptions of risk held by a range of important actors. This exploratory paper is intended to serve as a springboard for future work by providing a description of the nature of the uncertainty in CDM baselines, and by exploring the ramifications of decision-making in the face of this uncertainty. It concludes with a list of future questions that probe the ways in which different actors may be expected to maneuver within this uncertainty.

A Work Project, presented as part of the requirements for the Award of a Masters Degree in Finance from the NOVA – School of Business and Economics ; The increasing global attention to greenhouse emissions and the recent creation of EU Emission Trading Scheme has clearly suggested the need of consistent methods to value projects aimed to reduce gases. This need particularly concerns companies that have to find a way to both remain profitable and conform to new legal requirements. Multiple ways of cutting emission costs are available nowadays: short term abatement measures, which primary involve switching production machinery from coal to gas; long term abatement measures, which envisage the implementation of new types of projects .e.g Clean Development Mechanism or Joint Implementation Mechanism suggested by Kyoto Protocol -. In this work we study the impact of the introduction of both kinds of policy in a pricing model for CO2 allowances.

The article aims at examination of the shape of relationship between income inequality and the level of economic development measured by GDP per capita in 27 European Union countries in the period of 2004-2014. It also aims at identification of determinants of income inequality. Specifically, we test for the existence of an inverted U-shaped curve, as it is predicted by the standard Kuznets hypothesis, and J-shaped curve following the approach adopted by Deutsch and Silber (2004) and Anand and Kanbur (1993). The data come from Eurostat EU-SILC database (European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions), World Bank and International Monetary Fund. In the EU-27 group of countries we contradict the Kuznets hypothesis – our results provide evidence for a U-shaped, rather than the inverted U relationship. It also follows from our analysis that our data cover only the descending part of the U, that is a shape of inverted J.

This article considers the determinants of Portuguese tourism demand for the period 2004-2013. The econometric methodology uses a panel unit root test and the dynamic panel data (GMM-system estimator). The different techniques of panel unit root (Levin, Lin and Chu; Im, Pesaran and Shin W-stat and augmented Dickey-Fuller - Fisher Chi-square) show that the variables used in this panel are stationary. The dynamic model proves that tourism demand is a dynamic process. The variables relative prices, income per capita, human capital and government spending encourage international tourism demand for Portugal. ; info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion

This study examined the influence of government corporate tax policy on the performance of 54 randomly selected listed companies that cut across 17 categories of non-fi nancial fi rms in Nigeria over a period of 1990-2002. Using Generalised Method of Moment (GMM) and contrary to the expectation, the study found positive and significant relationship between corporate tax policy and the output performance of quoted manufacturing fi rms in Nigeria. This may be an indication that government revenue from corporate tax was judiciously expended on productive government expenditure such as road, security and power as nearly all fi rms selected are located in Lagos State. The study therefore, suggested that corporate tax if judiciously used in the provision of physical infrastructures and other public goods would reduce the cost of production of the private sector in Nigeria.

In diesem Diskussionspapier wird die Möglichkeit dargestellt, durch eine maßgebliche Nutzung des Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) die vorgegebenen Klimaschutzziele möglichst effizient, also mit möglichst geringen Kosten zu erreichen. Eine effiziente Reduzierung der CO2-Emissionen hilft, die für die Erreichung umweltpolitischer Ziele verbundenen Kosten auf das unvermeidbare Maß zu begrenzen und somit die Zustimmung der Bevölkerung zu ehrgeizigen Klimaschutzzielen nicht leichtfertig zu gefährden.

We consider the problem of determining the number of factors and selecting the proper regressors in linear dynamic panel data models with interactive fixed effects. Based on the preliminary estimates of the slope parameters and factors a la Bai (2009) and Moon and Weidner (2015), we propose a method for simultaneous selection of regressors and factors and estimation through the method of adaptive group Lasso (least absolute shrinkage and selection operator). We show that with probability approaching one, our method can correctly select all relevant regressors and factors and shrink the coefficients of irrelevant regressors and redundant factors to zero. Further, we demonstrate that our shrinkage estimators of the nonzero slope parameters exhibit some oracle property. We conduct Monte Carlo simulations to demonstrate the superb finite-sample performance of the proposed method. We apply our method to study the determinants of economic growth and find that in addition to three common unobserved factors selected by our method, government consumption share has negative effects, whereas investment share and lagged economic growth have positive effects on economic growth.