Weitzman (2012, 2013) has suggested a method for calculating social discount rates for long-term investments when project returns are covariant with consumption or other macroeconomic variables, so called "tail-hedge discounting". This method relies on a parameter called "real project gamma"...

The movement of goods from origin to destination takes place over multiple modes of transportation. Correspondingly, intermodal terminals play an important role in facilitating transportation over the multimodal network. This paper studies multimodal transport networks and their impact on...

Coastal cities around the world are locales of high vulnerability. The issues are graver in the developing world where the challenges posed by the urbanisation and climate change multiply the existing risks. Here, we examine the case of Kochi, an Indian city located at the centre of a rapidly...

As the first, substantive contribution, this paper revisits the effectiveness of two widely used public sponsored training programs, the first one focusing on intensive occupational training and the second one on short-term activation and job entry. We use an exceptionally rich administrative...

In the late 1980s privatization and down-sizing of nationalized steel mills and related firms in the metal industry have lead to large-scale redundancy plans. A special Steel Foundation was created as part of a social plan. This foundation acted like an independent training center, where...

Women without work after childbirth are at risk of losing their connection to the labor market. However, they may participate in adult education programs. We analyze the effect of this on the duration to work and on the wage rate, by applying conditional difference-in-differences approaches. We...

A key stated objective of the Australian Plain Packaging Act 2011 is to influence smoking prevalence, in particular of minors. We use the Roy Morgan Single Source (Australia) data set on minors, (that is, Australians aged 14 to 17 years) over the time period January 2001 to December 2013 to...

A stated objective of the Australian Plain Packaging Act 2011 is to reduce smoking prevalence. We use the Roy Morgan Single Source (Australia) data set over the time period January 2001 to December 2013 to analyze whether this goal has been achieved in the first year since the implementation. In...

This paper exploits a government initiative to analyze the effect of cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) for individuals with mild or moderate mental illness and multidisciplinary treatment (MDT) for individuals with pain in back and shoulders. We employ a propensity score matching approach to...

Because of risk aversion, any sensible investment valuation system should value less projects that contribute more to the aggregate risk, i.e., that have a larger income elasticity of net benefits. In theory, this is done by adjusting discount rates to consumption betas. But in reality, for...