This essay reviews what we currently know about the environmental consequences of economic growth and international trade. Using a unified framework, we critically review both theory and empirical evidence on issues such as the Environmental Kuznets Curve, the pollution haven hypothesis, and the effects of environmental policy differences on trade and investment flows. We consider how this evidence can help us evaluate ongoing policy debates, and we discuss directions for further research.

For the last ten years environmentalists and the trade policy community have engaged in a heated debate over the environmental consequences of liberalized trade. The debate was originally fueled by negotiations over the North American Free Trade Agreement and the Uruguay round of GATT negotiations, both of which occurred at a time when concerns over global warming, species extinction and industrial pollution were rising. Recently it has been intensified by the creation of the World Trade Organization (WTO) and proposals for future rounds of trade negotiations. The debate has often been unproductive. It has been hampered by the lack of a common language and also suffered from little recourse to economic theory and empirical evidence. The purpose of this essay is set out what we currently know about the environmental consequences of economic growth and international trade. We critically review both theory and empirical work to answer three basic questions. What do we know about the relationship between international trade, economic growth and the environment? How can this evidence help us evaluate ongoing policy debates? Where do we go from here?

We examine a model of long-term contracting in which the buyer is privately informed about the stochastic process by which her value for a good evolves. In addition, the realized values are also private information. We characterize a class of environments in which the profit-maximizing long-term contract offered by a monopolist takes an especially simple structure: we derive sufficient conditions on primitives under which the optimal contract consists of a menu of deterministic sequences of static contracts. Within each sequence, higher realized values lead to greater quantity provision; however, an increasing proportion of buyer types are excluded over time, eventually leading to inefficiently early termination of the relationship. Moreover, the menu choices differ by future generosity, with more costly (up front) plans guaranteeing greater quantity provision in the future. Thus, the seller screens process information in the initial period and then progressively screens across realized values so as to reduce the information rents paid in future periods.

R. Sato, M. Beckmann; Neutral Inventions and Production Functions: an Addendum, The Review of Economic Studies, Volume 35, Issue 3, 1 July 1968, Pages 366,

Immigration increased Israel's population by 12 percent between 1990 and 1994, after emigration restrictions were lifted in an unstable Soviet Union. Following the influx, occupations that employed more immigrants had substantially lower native wage growth and slightly lower native employment growth than others. However, because the immigrants' postmigration occupational distribution was influenced by relative labor market conditions across occupations in Israel, Ordinary Least Squares estimates of the immigrants' impact on those conditions are biased. Instrumental Variables estimation, exploiting information on the immigrants' former occupations abroad, suggests no adverse impact of immigration on native outcomes.

In this paper we outline three ways that experimental methods can add value to academic accounting research, practice, and particularly standard setters such as the Accounting Standards Board (AcSB), the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB), and the International Accounting Standards Committee (IASC). Through examples, we illustrate that, compared to archival methods, experimental methods can have three advantages in supplying evidence on questions that are important and relevant to financial accounting prescriptions. These advantages are timeliness, inclusiveness, and causality. First, experimental methods can be more timely in that experiments can be designed to provide evidence on an ex ante basis. This advantage particularly applies when there are no relevant archival data available and/or no close historical substitutes for a proposed accounting standard. Second, experiments can be more inclusive. They can test a spectrum of standard‐setting solutions that the archival approach precludes for lack of available data. Finally, experimental methods can powerfully isolate and measure the direction and strength of cause‐effect relations. In their decision making, standard setters require knowledge on the nature and cause of intended and unintended consequences of proposed and already promulgated standards. Therefore, cause‐effect evidence is a critical and valuable input to their deliberations. Résumé. Les auteurs décrivent trois façons d'augmenter, grâce aux méthodes expérimentales, la qualité de la recherche universitaire en comptabilité, de l'exercice de la profession comptable et, en particulier, du travail de normalisation comptable auquel se livrent des organismes comme l'Accounting Standards Board (AcSB), le Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) et l'International Accounting Standards Committee (IASC). Par des exemples, les auteurs illustrent le fait que les méthodes expérimentales peuvent présenter trois avantages, par rapport aux méthodes d'archivage, dans la documentation des questions d'importance pertinentes aux normes de comptabilité financière: la rapidité, l'intégralité et la causalité. En effet, les méthodes expérimentales peuvent être, en premier lieu, plus rapides, du fait qu'il est possible de concevoir les expériences de manière à obtenir des preuves documentaires sur une base ex ante. Cet avantage se concrétise particulièrement lorsqu'il n'existe pas de données d'archives pertinentes disponibles et (ou) aucun proche substitut de données historiques relativement à une norme comptable proposée. En deuxième lieu, les méthodes expérimentales peuvent être plus englobantes. Elles permettent parfois de vérifier un éventail de solutions, en ce qui a trait aux normes, que la méthode des données d'archives ne permet pas de vérifier en raison de l'insuffisance des données disponibles. En dernier lieu, les méthodes expérimentales permettent d'isoler et de mesurer clairement l'orientation et l'intensité des relations de cause à effet. Dans leurs décisions, les responsables de la normalisation doivent disposer de renseignements sur la nature et la cause des conséquences prévues et imprévues des normes proposées et déjà promulguées. C'est pourquoi la documentation relative à la causalité est d'un apport déterminant et précieux dans leurs délibérations.

R. Sato, M. J. Beckmann; Neutral Inventions and Production Functions1, The Review of Economic Studies, Volume 35, Issue 1, 1 January 1968, Pages 57–66, htt

We take up Cochrane’s (2011) challenge to identify the firm characteristics that provide independent information about average U.S. monthly stock returns by simultaneously including 94 characteristics in Fama-MacBeth regressions that avoid overweighting microcaps and adjust for data-snooping bias. We find that while 12 characteristics are reliably independent determinants in non-microcap stocks from 1980 to 2014 as a whole, return predictability sharply fell in 2003 such that just two characteristics have been independent determinants since then. Outside of microcaps, the hedge returns to exploiting characteristics-based predictability also have been insignificantly different from zero since 2003.