El Departamento de Economía de la Universidad de Chile tiene el agrado de invitar a usted a un nuevo Seminario Académico:

Título - “On the Use of Sufficient Statistics to Evaluate Externality correcting Policies”.

Autores -  Mark R. Jacobsen (University of California, San Diego), Christopher R. Knittel (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), James M. Sallee (University of California, Berkeley), Arthur A. Van Benthem (University  of Pennsylvania)

Presentador -  James M. Sallee.

Abstract: 

Pigouvian taxes fully correct for market failures due to externalities, but actual policies are commonly forced to deviate from the Pigouvian ideal by administrative or political constraints. This paper develops a framework for deriving su_cient statistics, which require a mínimum of market information, that aid in the evaluation of the e_ciency costs of such constraints on policy design. We demonstrate that, under certain intuitive conditions, standard output from a regression of true externalities on policy variables, including the R2 and the sum of squared residuals, have immediate welfare interpretations |they are su_cient statistics that compare alternative policies. We utilize our framework in three empirical applications that address diverse factors that cause actual policy to deviate from the Pigouvian ideal: random mismeasurement in externalities, imperfect spatial di_erentiation, and heterogeneity in the longevity of durable goods. The latter of these raises a set of concerns that is entirely new to the literature on energy e_ciency policy|the externalities attending energy-consuming durable goods depend on both energy e_ciency and total lifetime utilization, but policy is generally based on only energy e_ciency. Using our framework and a novel data set, we _nd that policies that regulate vehicle fuel economy, but ignore the variation in average longevity across di_erent types of automobiles, recover only about one-quarter to one-third of the welfare gains achievable by a policy that also takes product longevity into account.

El  Seminario  se realizará el viernes 04 de diciembre de 13:00 a 14:00 hrs, en  la Sala P-307 Tercer Piso del edificio Placa de la Facultad de Economía y Negocios de la Universidad de Chile, ubicada en Diagonal Paraguay 257.