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In recent years, the concept of circular economy has gained attention as a strategy to counter-act resource depletion and ensure sustainable development. A primary focus of the circular economy is to recirculate materials, thereby closing material loops, as opposed to losing them through incineration or landfilling. Consequently, recycling has been highlighted as a crucial measure in the transition towards circular economy, which has led to recycling targets for sev-eral waste material fractions in the EU. One of these materials is plastic for which specific strategies has been completed, emphasising the importance of quality of recycled plastic. The quality aspect is especially important regarding plastic from household waste (HHW), as this is a highly contaminated and heterogeneous waste stream. As a large share of the plastic products in the HHW is high-quality food packaging, recycling of plastic HHW to lower quality does therefore only contribute to partial closing of the plastic loop, because virgin plastic is still needed for the production of high quality plastic. This aspect needs to be taken into consideration, so the most circular waste management options can be identified. The aim of this presentation is to present a method for substitutability estimation that takes the aspect of quality and circularity of recycled plastic from HHW into account. The method focuses on waste plastic streams from HHW prepared for recycling and includes two steps: 1) quality assessment and 2) substitutability estimation. In step 1, the waste plastic stream in question is assigned either high, medium or low-quality, based on knowledge related to the degree of contamination. The quality levels are linked to the poten-tial applicability, in the sense that a waste plastic stream assigned high-quality has the poten-tial to be used in food packaging (complying with comprehensive legislation), whereas medi-um-quality at best can be used in toys, pharmaceuticals and electrical and electronics (applica-tions regulated to varying degrees), and low-quality streams can at best be used in building and construction, non-food packaging, automotive and others (applications not regulated). In step 2, the substitutability (also called substitution ratio or B-factor) is estimated based on the assigned quality and the European market share related to the applications in which the plastic has a potential to substitute virgin plastic. As an example, 57% of the Euro-pean PET is used to produce food packaging. If a PET stream from HHW is found to be me-dium-quality, meaning that it cannot be used for food-packaging (which requires high-quality), it does not have the potential to substitute virgin plastic in these 57% of the PET market and can therefore not close this part of the PET loop. Thus, such PET HHW streams are assigned a substitutability of 0.43 (=1-0.57). Consequently, due to the high level of food packaging in plastic HHW, only recycling where the plastic waste have the potential to be recycled into high-quality plastic contribute to the full circularity of plastic from HHW. This is especially important for PET and LDPE HHW streams, as more than 50 % of the European PET and LDPE markets are used for food packaging.

AbstractThe previous expansion of EdTech as a substitute for traditional learning around the world, the recent full‐scale substitution due to COVID‐19, and potential future shifts to blended approaches suggest that it is imperative to understand input substitutability between in‐person and online learning. We explore input substitutability in education by employing a novel randomized controlled trial that varies dosage of computer‐assisted learning (CAL) as a substitute for traditional learning through homework. Moving from zero to a low level of CAL, we find positive substitutability of CAL for traditional learning. Moving from a lower to a higher level of CAL, substitutability changes and is either neutral or even negative. The estimates suggest that a blended approach of CAL and traditional learning is optimal. The findings have direct implications for the rapidly expanding use of educational technology worldwide prior to, during, and after the pandemic.

In Germany we observe a decline in regular employment and an increase in atypical forms of employment. Especially marginal part-time employment which is characterized by lower tax rates and lower social security contributions increased substantially after a reform in 2003 made this type of employment even more attractive to employers. In our paper we estimate the substitutability of regular employment by marginal part-time employment using data on the industry level before and after the reform. We detect high substitution elasticities with respect to three skill categories of regular employment in both time periods. The substitutability of unskilled full-time workers increased significantly after the reform.

In this paper I investigate the optimal level of decentralization of tasks for the provision of a local public good. I enrich the well-known trade-off between internalization of spillovers (that favors centralization) and accountability (that favors decentralization) by considering that public goods are produced through multiple tasks. This adds an additional institutional setting, partial decentralization, to the classical choice between full decentralization and full centralization. The main results are that partial decentralization is optimal when both the variance of exogenous shocks to electorate's utility is large and the electorate expects high performance from politicians. I also show that the optimal institutional setting depends on the degree of substitutability / complementarity between tasks. In particular, I show that a large degree of substitutability between tasks makes favoritism more likely, which increases the desirability of partial decentralization as a safeguard against favoritism.

In Germany we observe a decline in regular employment and an increase in atypical forms of employment. Especially marginal part-time employment which is characterized by lower tax rates and lower social security contributions increased substantially after a reform in 2003 made this type of employment even more attractive to employers. In our paper we estimate the substitutability of regular employment by marginal part-time employment using data on the industry level before and after the reform. We detect high substitution elasticities with respect to three skill categories of regular employment in both time periods. The substitutability of unskilled full-time workers increased significantly after the reform. -- Mini-Jobs ; dynamic labor demand ; elasticities ; Hartz-reforms

What is your answer to the question: How Close to Full Capital Mobility Are We? It's got to depend on what countries are involved, what time horizon, etc. In a recent paper entitled "Measuring Financial Integration: More Data, More Countries, More Expectations", Hiro Ito and I tackle this question of mobility and substitutability (terminology due […]

Capital inflows with full repatriation give rise to welfare improvement possibilities in a small tariff‐distorted economy when imperfect competition and increasing returns are allowed for in one sector of a two‐sector model. This is in contrast to the Brecher–Alejandro proposition that capital inflows with full repatriation are necessarily immiserizing for a small tariff‐ridden economy. We find that welfare gains chances are greater (a) the higher the expenditure share of the capital‐intensive differentiated good; (b) the lower the substitutability between brands; and (c) the lower the share of tariff revenue in national income.

AbstractThis article considers the status and meaning of the category of value in the wake of the financial crisis that began in 2007. I argue that value is best understood as a form of social wealth constituted by a spatially and temporally generalising social relation of equivalence and substitutability under, and specific to, capitalism ‐ and that a categorial focus shows that despite massive 'devaluations', the value-relation is not itself in crisis. On the contrary, it is running at near full capacity, erasing the difference between 'financial' and 'real' capitals, values, and assets. Consequently, attempts to understand the crisis that rely on material distinctions between 'real' and 'fictitious' values and capitals overstate the extent and depth of the crisis for capital, and underestimate the virtually uninterrupted consolidation of the rule of the value, i.e. the territorial and historical imperative of equivalence and substitutability.

I develop a model of strategic communication to study information aggregation in an alliance between multiple players. An alliance exhibits four features: i) imperfect private information among players; ii) substitutability in actions; iii) constraints on the action set; and iv) preference heterogeneity (biases). The main result of the paper derives conditions for full information aggregation within the alliance under a public communication protocol. Full information aggregation ensues as long as players' biases are sufficiently cohesive with respect to the constraints on the action set. When players can (costlessly) choose an action set ex ante, I derive the precise conditions on the minimal action set such that there is full information aggregation. Comparative statics uncovers two sources for the differences in the size of the minimal action set between players: bias over outcomes (preference effect) and degree of interdependency (interdependency effect). The results are discussed in the context of burden sharing incentives during military interventions within NATO.

I develop a model of strategic communication to study information aggregation in an alliance between multiple players. An alliance exhibits four features: i) imperfect private information among players; ii) substitutability in actions; iii) constraints on the action set; and iv) preference heterogeneity (biases). The main result of the paper derives conditions for full information aggregation within the alliance under a public communication protocol. Full information aggregation ensues as long as players' biases are sufficiently cohesive with respect to the constraints on the action set. When players can (costlessly) choose an action set ex ante, I derive the precise conditions on the minimal action set such that there is full information aggregation. Comparative statics uncovers two sources for the differences in the size of the minimal action set between players: bias over outcomes (preference effect) and degree of interdependency (interdependency effect). The results are discussed in the context of burden sharing incentives during military interventions within NATO.

The Harrod-Domar (H-D) growth model assumes a fixed capital-output ratio, signifying absence of substitutability between capital and labor, leading to a "knife-edge" problem wherein balanced growth of capital (fixed warranted rate) and labor (fixed natural rate) occurs only by accident, preventing the attainment of macroeconomic stability with full employment. The neoclassical Solow-Swan (S-S) growth model provides an elegant solution to the H-D problem by endogenizing the warranted rate via the saving-investment relation, wherein capital growth is a function of a fully adjusting income-capital ratio (inverse of the H-D capital-output ratio)— allowing for smooth substitutability between capital and labor while keeping the natural rate exogenously fixed. The S-S model implies a positive, albeit temporary output growth effect of a higher saving rate. The present paper extends the capital-labor ratio's influence onto the natural rate via effects on labor productivity through a modified Arrow learning by doing framework, and via labor participation through real wage adjustments. Thus, the positive output growth of a higher saving rate, although temporary in the short run as in the S-S model, is permanent in the long run through adjustments in both the warranted and natural rates—a generalization of the Solow-Swan model.

© 2014 Elsevier B.V. We show that the full version of the so-called 'rural hospital theorem' generalizes to many-to-many matching problems where agents on both sides of the problem have substitutable and weakly separable preferences. We reinforce our result by showing that when agents' preferences satisfy substitutability, the domain of weakly separable preferences is also maximal for the rural hospital theorem to hold. ; F. Klijn gratefully acknowledges financial support from the Barcelona Graduate School of Economics, the Government of Catalonia (SGR2009-01142), and the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness through Plan Nacional I+D+i (ECO2011-29847) and the Severo Ochoa Programme for Centres of Excellence in R&D (SEV-2011-0075) ; Peer Reviewed