This paper presents the results of an analysis on Life Lacket (LJ) effectiveness in U.S. recreational boating between 2008 and 2011. We use the US Coast Guard's Boating Accident Report Database (BARD) to fit a Poisson regression of number of fatalities on many different factors interacting at...

The Deepwater Horizon well blow-out in 2010 in the U.S. Gulf of Mexico is a recent example of a major news and environmental event while the Exxon Valdez spill in 1989 is more distant with some similar characteristics. Previous work by the authors estimated the welfare loss from “passive use...

Risks continue near the coasts such as flooding, oil spills, deaths and unemployment despite numerous policies to prevent and mitigate their effects. Such policies are typically analyzed in their natural units, such as jobs, and so comparisons are difficult across risk categories. An approach...

This paper models faculty participation in university decision-making and the effects on enrollment, academic quality and non-academic quality. The model predicts that faculty participation positively academic quality and non-academic quality. The model predicts that faculty participation...

Benefit-cost analysis is seen by some as a controversial activity in which the analyst can significantly bias the results. This note highlights some of the ways that analysts can "lie" in a benefit-cost analysis but more importantly, provides guidance on how not to lie and how to better inform...

We document changes in income and earnings inequality in the five Central American countries from the early 1990s to 2009. In the 1990s Costa Rica had the most equal distribution of income in Central America, and one of the most equal distributions of income in Latin America. At the other...

There is a rich literature addressing the paradox of not voting and election turnout from both theoretical and empirical perspectives. By taking advantage of a unique dataset from an “experimental” setting, this paper is the first to estimate the utility that drives the “civic duty” or...

The average payback percentage from slot machines is important to gamblers, casinos, and governments. While apparently simple to define several complications can exist, among them which measure to average and potentially misleading formulas to calculate the average. Daily slot machine data from...

In matching theory of contracts the substitutes condition plays an essential role to ensure the existence of stable matchings. We study many-to-many matchings where groups of individuals, of size possibly greater than two, are matched to a set of institutions. Real-world examples include orphan...

This paper addresses revolutionary changes in the education, fertility and market work of U.S. families formed in the 1870s-1920s: Fertility fell from 5.3 to 2.6; the graduation rate of their children increased from 7 to 50 percent; and the fraction of adulthood wives devoted to market-oriented...