In recent years, economists have started to move beyond calculating regulatory effects on a pollutant-by-pollutant basis since their interaction is important. In this study, we take up this issue. To allow for joint production of multiple pollutants and marketable output, we specify our technology using a directional distance function. This...
This paper empirically investigates three hypotheses regarding biases of National Basketball Association (NBA) referees. Using a sample of 28,388 quarter-level observations from six seasons, we find that referees make calls that favor home teams, teams losing during games, and teams losing
in playoff series. All three biases are likely to...
This paper shows the first autocorrelation of basketball shot results is a highly biased
and inconsistent estimator of the first autocorrelation of the ex ante probabilities the
shots are made. Shot result autocorrelation is close to zero even when shot probability
autocorrelation is close to one. The bias is caused...
Productivity change after transition to an individual transferable quota (ITQ) management system is driven by exit of some vessels, entry of other vessels, and changes in productivity of existing vessels. Generally, it is thought that an ITQ system boosts productivity due to the exit of less productive vessels. However, ITQ...
Recent literature has investigated whether the welfare gains from environmental taxation are
larger or smaller in a second-best setting than in a first-best setting. This question has mainly
been addressed indirectly, by asking whether the second-best optimal environmental tax is higher
or lower than the first-best Pigouvian rate. Even this...
A major challenge for biodiversity conservation is to mitigate the effects of future environmental change, such as land use, in important areas for biodiversity conservation. In the United States, recent conservation efforts by The Nature Conservancy and partners have identified and mapped the nation's Areas of Biodiversity Significance (ABS), representing...
Chile’s open trade policy, implemented during the last few decades, has greatly transformed Chilean farmers and their production systems. As a result, farmers can be grouped into three categories based on their market-production orientation: domestic, transitional or export producers. The objective of this paper is to analyze the factors underlying...
Water scarcity may appear to be a simple concept, but it can be difficult to apply to complex natural-human systems. While aggregate scarcity indices are straightforward to compute, they do not adequately represent the spatial and temporal variations in water scarcity that arise from complex systems interactions. The uncertain effects...
We evaluate the return on investment (ROI) from public land conservation in the state of Minnesota, USA. We use a spatially-explicit modeling tool, the Integrated Valuation of Ecosystem Services and Tradeoffs (InVEST), to estimate how changes in land use and land cover (LULC), including public land acquisitions for conservation, influence...
This study examines productivity change in the Mid-Atlantic surfclam and ocean quahog fishery, which has been managed since 1990 using Individual Transferable Ouotas (ITQ). Productivity change is estimated through a Malmquist index from 1981-2008, capturing change before and after implementation of the quota system. We then decompose the index to...