Comparing the safety of prescription drugs over time is difficult due to the paucity of reliable quantitative measures of drug safety. Both the academic literature and popular press have focused on drug withdrawals as a proxy for breakdowns in the drug safety system. This metric, however, is...

Developing countries can participate in the Kyoto Protocol to limit greenhouse gas emissions by adopting national emissions limits. Such limits could offer economic gains to developing countries, cost savings to industrialized countries, and environmental benefits. They could also address...

Recent literature on greenhouse gas controls shows the costs of climate protection can be offset by the ancillary benefits generated from lower local air pollution. We show here that such ancillary benefits imply the unfettered price of carbon emissions permits observed in tradable permit...

Regulations to promote health and safety that are exceptionally costly relative to the expected health benefits may actually worsen health and safety, since compliance reduces other spending, including private spending on health and safety. Past studies relating income and mortality give...

The authors focus on the effect of state versus private ownership on the rates of firm-specific productivity growth and cost decline by developing a model of endogenous, firm-specific productivity growth and testing its implications against panel data on twenty-three international airlines of...

FDA approval times have declined significantly since the enactment of the Prescription Drug User Fee Act (PDUFA) in 1992. As a result, present value expected returns to pharmaceutical R&D have likely increased. In the current paper we employ a unique survey dataset, one which includes data from...

The cost-effectiveness of cap-and-trade emissions regulations has become widely accepted. A 2009 proposal by Muller and Mendelsohn would replace conventional ton-for-ton trading with trading based on estimates of marginal damages by pollutant and by source. This proposal faces difficulties...

In their recent paper , Efficient Pollution Regulation: Getting the Prices Right (henceforth, EPR), Muller and Mendelsohn describe a broader, more appealing concept of efficiency that incorporates information on damages caused by emissions from specific sources: “The science and economics...