Browsing by Author "Boyce, John R."
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- ItemOpen AccessA nonparametric analysis of the personal income distribution across the provinces and states in the U.S. and Canada(2003) Wang, Yibing; Boyce, John R.
- ItemOpen AccessAn empirical examination of the effects of endogenous growth on exhaustible resource prices(2008) Tamblyn, Charles Vernon; Boyce, John R.This paper examines the role that technological change plays in the price paths of natural resource commodities. The theory of endogenous technological change suggests that the more important a resource is in the world economy, the more likely there will be innovation. The hypothesis tested in this paper is that periods of price declines for natural resources and minerals is induced by endogenous technical change. The nature of the relationship between prices and the share in the world economy is complicated by the fact that the resources price appears in both the growth rate of the price and the share of the world economy. This forces us to deal with the "reflection" problem in econometrics. Once this is done, we find that there is indeed a negative correlation between the rate of growth of prices and the share of the resource in the world economy.
- ItemOpen AccessBurning Out of Time: Power Plant Decommissions and Mine Closures in the Appalachians(2019-04-12) Viccini, Reinaldo; Muehlenbachs, Lucija A.; Boyce, John R.; Church, Jeffrey R.For the past 50 years, coal has been the most important fuel for electricity generation in the United States. The power sector on its own consumes 90% of all domestically-mined coal and supplies 30% of the nation's energy demand. Facing serious challenges from low natural gas prices, environmental regulation and increasing operational costs, coal-fired power plants are being decommissioned at increasing rates. Similarly, since 2010, coal production has fallen by 28.5% and nearly half of the existing mines have permanently closed. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the claim that power plant decommissions are causing closures and production declines in Appalachian mines. If decommissions are impacting mines in any way, given the regional nature of coal markets, nearby mines should be the most affected. The empirical strategy begins by testing the assumption that power plants buy local coal. I argue that observed differences in power plant efficiencies, by state and plant size, emerge as a consequence of local coal quality. Next, I estimate the correlations between aggregate electricity generation and coal consumption from nearby power plants on the mine's production (intensive margin) and probability of closure (extensive margin). Results suggest that changes in aggregate electricity generation and coal consumption from the 10 nearest plants have a larger impact on the local mine's intensive and extensive margin as compared to plants in further locations. Finally, using an event-study methodology, I estimate the causal effect of a decommission within the 10 nearest plants to the mine.
- ItemOpen AccessEquilibrium concepts in exhaustible resource economics(2007) Vojtassak, Lucia; Boyce, John R.
- ItemOpen AccessEssays on government policy and the development of natural resources(2011) Winter, Jennifer L.; Boyce, John R.
- ItemOpen AccessEssays on risk preference elicitation in the laboratory(2008) Bruner, David; McKee, Michael John; Boyce, John R.
- ItemOpen AccessExamining the decision of mountain climbers to continue engaging in the risky sport of mountaineering(2007) Weir, Laura Jeanne; Boyce, John R.
- ItemOpen AccessLearning in games: an experimental analysis of how learning takes place in games with stable and unstable nash equilibria(2004) Luyendyk, Megan; Boyce, John R.
- ItemOpen AccessNatural gas prices and competition among natural gas pipelines(2003) Blumer, Serenity; Boyce, John R.
- ItemOpen AccessNet federal spending and Canadian elections(2002) Hou, Helen Xinrong; Boyce, John R.
- ItemOpen AccessOptimal Taxation and Innovation in the Presence of Externalities(2018-05-16) Hosseini , Hossein; Tombe, Trevor; Muehlenbachs, Lucija A.; Boyce, John R.The title of my thesis is “Optimal Taxation and Innovation in the Presence of Externalities.” It explores the effects of externalities on optimal income taxation and innovation. On the one hand, governments’ income redistribution policies among households affect pollution since households are different in terms of how much they pollute. This affects the design of an optimal income tax schedule. On the other hand, externalities affect the bias of technological change over time and also how much sectors (or countries) innovate. Firstly, scarcity rents induce biased innovation in the natural resource sector over time, which has important implications for fossil fuels’ prices and production. Secondly, spillovers from innovative activities among sectors (or countries) affect how much they innovate and necessitate policies, such as patents, to overcome this market failure. The first chapter of my thesis is titled “Optimal Income Taxation in the Presence of Consumption Externalities”. This paper characterizes an optimal income tax and transfer system considering the effects of income redistribution on pollution. Low-income households pollute more per dollar of consumption than high-income households. Therefore, redistributing income towards low-income households can increase pollution. This paper modifies an optimal income taxation model and derives the optimal tax rates that maximize welfare while considering pollution. Income tax provides revenue for the government and results in welfare loss to those who pay taxes. This paper takes into account the fact that income tax also affects pollution through both redistributing income and changing the amount that people work. I derive the optimal income tax rates using the pollution intensities of U.S. households at different income levels. The results show that optimal marginal tax rates are lower and the optimal tax schedule is substantially less progressive compared to models that ignore pollution. This is important because the effect of the current U.S. income tax and transfers on pollution is not trivial. I find that, annually, the U.S. income tax and transfer system contributes roughly 6-9 percent to aggregate pollution of households. This paper further demonstrates that income taxes can complement other policies to efficiently reduce pollution. Market power and scarcity rents, as other kinds of externalities, can bias technological change in the natural resource sector. The second chapter of my thesis is titled “The Upstream Bias in Technological Change with Exhaustible Resources”. This paper focuses on the implications of the bias of technological change in the natural resource sector. In this paper, I collaborate with Dr. John Boyce, a Professor of Economics at the University of Calgary. The main stylized fact that motivates the paper is that for eighty minerals over the past century, exhaustible resource prices have been falling relative to incomes and exhaustible resource production has been rising. In contrast to Hotelling’s theory of exhaustible resources, long-term trends show falling resource prices and rising resource production. We explain this using a theory of an exhaustible resource economy where R&D is endogenously targeted either to the upstream exhaustible resource sector or to the downstream final good sector. An upstream bias in technological change explains the observed trends. This bias is attributed to a low relative upstream state of technology and low scarcity for exhaustible resources. The bias in R&D eventually switches to the downstream sector. Thereafter, exhaustible resource prices rise and exhaustible resource production falls. Per capita consumption grows and the mining share of labor falls all along the equilibrium. In addition to the bias of innovation over time, spillovers of innovative activities among sectors (or countries) provide a positive externality that results in too little innovation in a competitive market. To overcome this market failure and fully reward innovative efforts, many countries commonly use Intellectual Property Rights (IPRs), such as patenting and copyrights. The third chapter of my thesis explores the effects of IPRs on innovation and economic growth. The title of this chapter is “Intellectual Property Rights and Innovation in a North-South Model”. IPRs encourage incentives for innovators but they also have welfare costs by providing innovators with monopoly power for a specific time frame. IPRs might also adversely affect future innovation since they make current discoveries less accessible for potential innovators. In the third chapter of my thesis, I incorporate this adverse effect of IPRs on subsequent innovators into a North-South dynamic general equilibrium model to investigate the overall effect of tighter IPRs on economic growth and welfare. In the model, the North innovates and the South imitates and tighter IPRs not only reduce the South’s imitation rate, but they also lower labour productivity in the R&D sector in the North. The model’s results indicate that tighter IPRs hurt innovation in the long run. Moreover, in contrast to previous models, the short-run effect could also be negative. In addition, I decompose the welfare effects to four components: changes in (a) terms of trade (b) production composition (c) available products, and (d) intertemporal composition of consumption. The model’s results show that tighter IPRs may hurt both the North and the South on account of all these four welfare components, except for the terms of trade from which the North benefits and the South loses.
- ItemOpen AccessThe Role of Political Parties in the Organization of Congress(Oxford University Press, 2002) Bischak, Diane; Boyce, John R.Theory and evidence on political party competition in the U. S. Congress and its effect on the compositions of committees is considered. Parties compete over multiple policy dimensions by allocating party members to committees. The leadership of each party simultaneously and non-cooperatively selects its committees’ membership in order to maximize the joint utility of its members, taking into account how the committee membership affects the legislation adopted by the legislature. Parties are constrained both by institutional rules and by the heterogeneity of party members’ preferences in their allocation of members across committees. These restrictions mean that to gain an edge in one policy dimension, a party must give ground elsewhere. Interest group ratings from the U.S. House of Representatives provide evidence that the parties stack of committees in a manner consistent with the predictions of the theoretical model. Indeed, tests of alternative hypotheses reveal that these hypotheses explain at best only half of the committees in the U. S. Congress, while the party competition hypothesis is consistent with the overall structure of the committees.
- ItemOpen AccessThe analysis of the environmental kuznets curve and its application in Canada(2004) Li, Runtao; Boyce, John R.
- ItemOpen AccessThree Essays in Energy and Policy Analysis(2020-01-03) During, Adegboyega Daniel; Gordon, Daniel Vernon; Walls, W. David; Boyce, John R.This dissertation consists of three chapters. In the first chapter, I estimated the cost of lifting natural gas in Alberta. I applied activity based costing to estimate the cost of production for each well for the period under review and used this in estimating the production parameter in a Cobb-Douglas model. I subjected this to various robustness tests and the results were consistent across the variations of the data applied. The contribution of this paper is to add to empirical understanding of the cost characteristics in lifting natural gas at the well level using data from wells in Alberta, Canada. I am particularly interested in measuring for common factors affecting production costs across reservoirs and also for individual well effects. In the second chapter, I investigate how an important policy impacted crude oil production in some states in Nigeria and restored peace back in the region. Using a difference-in-differences approach, I estimate the causal effect of amnesty on crude oil production in three states of the Niger Delta region that experienced militant attacks. I find that this policy eliminated the militant activities and increased crude oil production in these three states by about 40% relative to the six control states. The results suggest that rather than the repressive actions of the government in the past, amnesty was a better solution in the short term to ensure relative peace and sustained crude oil production in the region. In the final chapter, I consider how institutional changes, once in place, effect educational outcomes. In this chapter, I examine the effect of a change from a civil law to Sharia law impacts education outcomes of Muslims in the states that adopted Sharia law. I found that contrary to the subjective reasoning of the average southern non Muslims, Sharia had no negative impact on education outcomes as a whole. I further estimated these effects by sex, age, and intensity of adoption of Sharia and found that females in High Intensive Sharia states were affected by the adoption of Sharia and they lost between half and three quarters of a year of education. On the extensive effect of Sharia conducted via probit, there was an increase in the probability of enrolment in school of between 14% and 18%. These effects are estimated through difference-in-differences and triple differences approaches.