Approximately 31 million children enroll in the National School Lunch Program and nearly 1/3 of children between the ages of 6 and 19 are considered obese. What if the school food environment made healthy food choices easier for children? One overlooked scalable alternative involves students...

The federal "sustainability standard" requires ethanol to emit at least 20 percent less carbon dioxide (CO2) than gasoline. Recent rulings by California and the Environmental Protection Agency, however, have cast doubt on the methodology of the sustainability calculus and whether those standards...

If the market allocates goods to those willing and able to pay the most for them, efforts to target durable health goods such as insecticide-treated bednets (ITNs) to poor populations may prove ineffective, with the poor reselling donated goods to the non-poor who value them more highly....

Findings from behavioral and psychological studies indicate that people regularly and predictably behave in ways that contradict some standard assumptions of economic analysis. Recognizing that consumption choices are determined by factors other than prices, income, and information illuminates a...

This paper analyzes the impact of an ethanol import tariff in conjunction with a consumption mandate and tax credit. A tax credit alone acts as a subsidy to ethanol producers, equally benefiting exporters like Brazil. If an import tariff is imposed to offset the tax credit, world prices of...

With a mandate, U.S. policy of ethanol tax credits designed to reduce oil consumption does the exact opposite. A tax credit is a direct gasoline consumption subsidy with no effect on the ethanol price and therefore does not help either corn or ethanol producers. To understand this, consider...

Economists frequently focus on correlations between wealth and risk preferences but rarely observe the probabilities needed to test this relationship empirically. These unobserved probabilities are typically estimated via profit or production functions conditioned on wealth correlates, which may...

Measuring food waste is essential to determine the impact of school interventions on what children eat. There are multiple methods used for measuring food waste, yet it is unclear which method is most appropriate in large-scale interventions with restricted resources. This study examines which...