Economic incentives play an important role in occupational safety and health, affecting the behavior and decisions of workers, firms and government. This monograph discusses factors that affect workers' decisions about whether to choose risky jobs, how careful to be on the job, and how long to...

This paper argues that there are many challenges to designing and implementing water and sanitation interventions that actually deliver economic benefits to the households in developing countries. Perhaps most critical to successful water and sanitation investments is to discover and implement...

The goal of this article is to provide a general characterization of group behavior in a market environment. A crucial feature of our approach is that we do not restrict the form of individual preferences or the nature of individual consumptions; we allow for public as well as private...

It is now standard in economics to model natural resources as a special form of capital that can be depleted or accumulated. The following review shows how such an approach can be extended to ecosystems, implying that they are a form of natural asset that produces a flow of beneficial goods and...

This review provides a timely summary of the current understanding of the various impacts and contributes positively to the policy debate. We have several key conclusions: (1) Biofuels are diverse and evolving; (2) Greenhouse gas (GHG) benefits vary significantly across various types of biofuels...

Seller reputation is an important asset because buyers often choose sellers on the basis of their reputation. This is particularly true when the quality of the good or service transacted is hard to measure and the parties cannot perfectly contract on the outcome of the transaction. As a...

In this relatively short survey, we present the core elements of the microeconomic analysis of insurance markets at a level suitable for senior undergraduate and graduate economics students. The aim of this analysis is to understand how insurance markets work, what their fundamental economic...

In 1958, Jacob Mincer pioneered an important approach to understand how earnings are distributed across the population. In the years since Mincer's seminal work, he as well as his students and colleagues extended the original human capital model, reaching important conclusions about a whole...

The analysis of how individuals obtain and are paid for their skills is fundamental to labor economics. The basic idea of human capital theory is that workers and firms invest in workers' skills in order to increase their productivity, much as persons invest in financial or physical assets to...

The objective of this text is to develop the theory of social health insurance (SHI; the expression used especially in the United States is "public health insurance," which will be viewed as one variant of SHI here). While a good deal is known about the demand and supply of private insurance,...