【Renewed Employment Talk】How Do Political Institutions Affect Sustainability?
2024/11/26
研討會日期 : 2024-11-26
時間 : 14:30
主講人 : Professor Meng-Yu Liang (梁孟玉)
地點 : Conference Room B110
主持人 : Professor Chun-Hsien Yeh
演講者簡介 : Professor Meng-Yu Liang received her Ph.D. in Economics from The University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1999. She is an Associate Research Fellow at the Institute of Economics, Academia Sinica. Her research interests are Industrial Organization, Microeconomic Theory, and Public Economics.
演講摘要 : Inspired by the environmental collapse of Easter Island (AER, 1998), this paper adapts the doer-planner addiction model by Gul and Pesendorfer (REStud, 2007) into a government-citizen framework to explore the sustainability implications of democratic versus autocratic regimes. While some scholars argue that autocracy may better address environmental crises, our analysis shows this is true only within a narrow parameter range. In our model, a ruler allocates resources between consumer goods and the construction of large statues, with the potential for addiction-like preferences that diverge from citizens' interests. We find that when the discount factor is low, democracy promotes sustainability; when high, both regimes perform equally. Citizens' accountability demands play a crucial role in intermediate discount factors: when citizens are "weak," democracy's threat of leadership replacement is ineffective. We identify a parameter range where an autocrat's self-discipline can avert environmental collapse, while democratic regimes may fall short.
