Using rockets to launch communications satellites and other spacecraft poses risks to the uninvolved public, including persons and property under the flight path of the launch vehicle. The federal government plays a pivotal technical role during the actual launch by carrying out certain...

The cliché in the electricity sector, the "cheapest power plant is the one we don’t build," seems to neglect the benefits of the energy that plant would generate. Those overall benefits could be countered by benefits to consumers if "not building that plant" was the result of monopsony. A...

Among the many complex issues of technology, governance, and market design affecting the electricity sector, climate policy has become dominant. From the perspective of a nonspecialist looking at this changing dominance, a quiz illuminates some of the peculiar uses of language one can find in...

We analyze voting on subsidies for professional sports facilities in Harris County (Houston), Texas and Brown County (Green Bay), Wisconsin to learn more about voter preferences for these subsidies. The results differ somewhat between the two jurisdictions, as do the nature of the supports being...

I investigate the relationship between big-time college football programs and state appropriations to public institutions of higher education. Estimation of a linear reduced form model of the determination of state appropriations to higher education, using a panel of financial, athletic, and...

After declining from the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s, earnings inequality in Costa Rica stabilized from 1987 to 1992 and then increased from 1992 to 1999. In this paper we use recently-developed techniques to measure the extent to which these changes in earnings inequality were the result of...

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...

Floods provide a useful example of risky events that span a range from small to catastrophic. In such circumstances the economically preferred measure of the benefits is based on an ex-ante measure that takes into account a person’s willingness to pay to avoid variability in their income or...