In the first session (9:00-10:30), Dr. Nguyen Phan Bach Su from FEC, Hoa Sen University will give a brief introduction to LaTeX, a high-quality typesetting system to produce scientific documents. Currently, LaTeX is used widely by many researchers to present their research. Most scientific journals provide LaTeX templates for the authors to prepare the manuscripts. In this introduction, some basic LaTeX tasks (e.g. creating tables, figures, equations) are discussed. Also, advantages and disadvantages of LaTeX as compared to MS Word are presented.

If you would like to learn and practice LaTeX, you can download the LaTeX system from . For ones who are not familiar with coding/syntax, it is better to also download TeXstudio, an integrated writing environment (). These tools are free for download and use.

In the second session, it is our great pleasure to welcome to our seminars Professor Michel Simioni from Toulouse School of Economics (TSE), INRA, France. Prof Simioni will share with us his research paper “The impact of pollution abatement investments on technology: Porter hypothesis revisited”.

Abstract:

This paper revisits the Porter hypothesis by pursuing two new directions. First, we compare the results obtained with two complementary approaches parametric stochastic frontier analysis and conditional nonparametric frontier analysis. They presents relative advantages and drawbacks. Secondly, we pay attention not only on the average pollution abatement effort effect but we also focus on its variability across firms and over time. We provide new results suggesting that the traditional view about the effect of environmental regulation on productivity and the Porter hypothesis may coexist. This evidence supports the idea that a well-designed environmental regulation affects positively the firm performances in some instances.