With the Paris Agreement coming into effect, China, as the largest CO2 emitter in the world, will be facing greater pressure to reduce its carbon emissions. This paper discusses how to solve this issue from the perspective of financial development in China. Although many studies have analyzed its impact on carbon emissions, the conclusions are contradictory. A major criticism of the existing studies is the reasonability of the selection of appropriate indicators and panel estimation techniques. Almost all studies use only one or limited indicators to represent the financial development and ignore the cross-sectional dependence. To fulfil the gaps mentioned above, a financial development index system is built, and with the framework of the STIRPAT (Stochastic impacts by regression on population, affluence, and technology) model, this paper applies an ARDL approach to investigating the long-run relationship between financial development and carbon emissions and a dynamic panel error-corrected model to capture the short-run impact. The empirical results show that financial development can improve carbon emissions, and such impact not only shows a regional difference but also reflects the features of stage differences. Additionally, based on the discussion on seven specific aspects of financial development, our findings can be helpful for policy makers to enact corresponding policies to realize the goal of reducing carbon emissions in China.

No abstract

No abstract

In this paper, we analyze the strategic abstention in laboratory under costly sequential voting where voter's payoff depends on his/her preference parameter and voters are separated into different size of early and later groups. The experimental results show that the size of early and later voting groups has a strong impact upon voters' turnout. The voting advantage and the strategies which early and later voters have are affected by their group size. When the size of early group is much smaller than that of later group, early voters tend to choose abstention to avoid voting cost since they realize that the later voters can swing the early voting results. On the contrary, the early voters would turn out more frequently and try to decide the voting results when they learn the size of early group is larger than that of later group.