268 research outputs found
Essays on the economics of disease control and child malnutrition
Get PDFThesis (Ph.D.), School of Economic Sciences, Washington State UniversityDetermining the benefits of infectious diseases control can provide the impetus for policy makers to prioritize disease control, but this requires knowledge about how control measures affect disease outcomes and how to monetize these outcomes, so that disease control can be viewed as a benefit rather than a cost.The first part of this dissertation investigates how preventative canine rabies vaccination affects human rabies post-exposure prophylaxis (PEP) demand and human rabies deaths. It begins by estimating a mean (median) value of a statistical life (VSL) of approximately US 54,000) from the human rabies PEP demand decision following an animal attack in an area where rabies is endemic using contact-tracing data from the Serengeti District of Tanzania for the years 2002 to 2007. This is followed by developing and calibrating an economic model of canine rabies control that incorporates the benefits of control in terms of reductions in human PEP and human rabies deaths valued by the VSL. The model suggests that dog vaccination provides large benefits at low vaccination coverage levels, even if PEP demand increases with dog vaccination. This suggests that investing in dog vaccination provides large returns.The second part of this dissertation investigates the determinants of improvements in child nutrition in Paraguay between the years 2005 and 2012 using an Oaxaca decomposition technique. Before 2005, Paraguay observed a high stunting prevalence and one of the highest rural-urban child malnutrition differentials in the world. Yet by 2012, the country was able to decrease stunting prevalence to 10% nationally and eliminate the rural-urban gap. I find that statistically significant improvements in female education, income, access to safe water, and more favorable household demographics were associated with nearly half of the total improvement in rural child HAZ. While, in urban areas, statistically significant improvements in female education and access to improved sanitation accounted for only a quarter of the total improvement in urban child HAZ. These findings suggest that policy interventions should be tailored to the needs of rural and urban populations, and that female education is very important in both areas.School of Economic Sciences, Washington State Universit
Biofuel policy for the pursuit of multiple goals: The case of Washington State
Get PDFAgricultural and Food Policy, Resource /Energy Economics and Policy,
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Wetland mitigation banking analysis & comparison of market mechanisms
Get PDFFederal regulation currently requires that wetland fills be offset by providing compensatory mitigation under a Clean Water Act Section 404 permit. This policy, often described as "no net-loss," has facilitated the emergence of wetland mitigation banking. Wetland mitigation banking, a market oriented mechanism, works by allowing landowners to generate credits through restoring, enhancing, creating and/or preserving wetlands and selling them to those impacting wetlands for a cash return. Over the last several years, wetland mitigation banking markets have materialized as the preferable compensatory method of providing no net-loss. Timing issues due to the ecological, economic, and regulatory conditions surrounding the credit market have created situations of credit "misses" or lags between permittees and suppliers. These misses can be characterized as credit shortages or excess demand in the compensatory market. In cases of credit shortages, permittees may provide mitigation themselves. However, permittee-responsible has associated opportunity costs since permit review times are longer compared to mitigation banking. In North Carolina, excess demand and increased permit review times provoked the creation of the Ecosystem Enhancement Program, a partnership between North Carolina's Department of Transportation and North Carolina's Department of Environment and Natural Resources. Under this program, credits are generated in advance of wetland impacts thus eliminating excess demand. Acting as a wetland credit broker, the Ecosystem Enhancement Programs coordinates the North Carolina Department of Transportation with credit suppliers promoting excess supply of wetland credits by investing early in credit generation. This paper offers analysis of costs surrounding two wetland banking market mechanisms, conventional wetland mitigation banking and the Ecosystem Enhancement Program. The analysis provides information regarding the economic conditions surrounding both mechanisms, cost tradeoffs, and which mechanism is less costly at providing wetlands protection to society. The costs of excess supply and excess demand are modeled for the two market mechanisms and compared. Comparative statics derived from first order conditions, help to understand the circumstances and factors influencing low market cost mitigation
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The viability of dredging Upper Klamath Lake to mitigate drought impact a cost-benefit analysis
Get PDFThis thesis reviews the cost-benefit of dredging Upper Klamath Lake in Southern Oregon as a means to alleviate water stresses in the area. Currently, agricultural users must forego water use during low precipitation years and are compensated for losses by federal government transfers. Curtailments on water use are due to Environmental Protection Agency restrictions on minimum lake level and downstream flow requirements. There are two types of benefits assumed to arise from such a project; the first is that dredging the lake would provide additional water storage for agricultural users during low precipitation years making government transfers unnecessary. The second is an improvement to water quality as a result of increasing lake depth. Benefits to recreational users of the lake are estimated through use of benefits transfer techniques. Soil productivity rates and acreage totals are used to estimate the value of having available irrigation water for agricultural users. The result of this study is a cost-benefit analysis table. The table gives a range of potential estimates based on varying project sizes, interest rates, drought frequencies, and benefits transfer methods. The conclusion of the study is that the net benefit of dredging Upper Klamath Lake would be advantageous in some scenarios but not all
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Biofuel policy for the pursuit of multiple goals The case of Washington State
Get PDFThis paper provides a synopsis of a set of policy recommendations developed in Yoder, et al. (2008). The recommendations are discussed in the context of biofuel policy developments occurring now in Western North America and particularly in the Pacific coast states and British Columbia. The analysis draws on the rapidly growing economic literature on biofuel and global warming policy as well as the broader literature on policy design and implementatio
Three essays on wildfire economics and policy
Get PDFThesis (Ph.D.), School of Economic Sciences, Washington State UniversitySchool of Economic Sciences, Washington State Universit
Interst Group Incentives for Post-lottery Trade Restrictions
Get PDFThe rights to use publicly-managed natural resources are sometimes distributed by lottery,and typically these rights are non-transferable. Prohibition of post-lottery permit transfers discourages applicants from entering the lottery solely for protable permit sale, so only those who personally value the use of the resource apply. However, because permits are distributed randomly and trade is restricted, permits may not be used by those who value them most. We examine a possible rationale for restrictions on permit transfers based on the distribution of welfare across interest groups, and characterize the economic conditions under which post-lottery prohibitions on trade are likely to arise. We develop our model using the specic case of the Four Rivers Lottery used to allocate rafting permits on four river sections in Idaho and Oregon.lottery, trade prohibition, interest groups
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THREE ESSAYS ON THE IMPACT OF SCHOOL CLOSURES IN YEARS 2020-21 ON PARENTS AND CHILDREN
Get PDFMy dissertation is a series of papers that study the effects of school closures in years 2020-21 on parental labor-market outcomes and educational outcomes of secondary and post-secondary students. My first chapter shows that k-12 school and childcare facility closures affect both the mothers and fathers of pre-school and school-age children through a reduction in their work hours, and in some cases earnings. These effects are concentrated among parents without a college degree, parents working in occupations that do not lend themselves to telework, and parents without other family members living at home. My second chapter finds that while high school graduation rates remained stable when schools closed, math proficiency rates suffered, particularly among vulnerable student groups, whereas reading/language and arts proficiency rates saw some improvements. My third chapter shows that university and college closures, coupled with social distancing mandates, led to a decline in both overall and in-state enrollments, with out-of-state enrollments also diminishing in some instances
Understanding the relationship between water price, value, and cost
Get PDFDiscussions about issues related to water in arid regions like Central Washington tend to be contentious. Tensions can be exacerbated when there is a lack of clarity over what is being discussed. This often arises when discussing the economics of water using the terms price, value, and cost. These are typically the metrics over which policy alternatives for water reallocation are made and non-economists tend to use them interchangeably. However, each term represents a fundamentally different concept and confusion over their meanings can generate arguments and confusion to an unnecessary degree. This bulletin will explain the difference between price, value, and cost in the context of water, and when each concept is relevant and when it is not. It concludes with a review of data on observed water prices, values, and costs in Washington
A bivariate Markov regime switching GARCH approach to estimate time varying minimum variance hedge ratios
No full text[[abstract]]This article develops a new bivariate Markov regime switching BEKK-Generalized Autoregressive Conditional Heteroscedasticity (GARCH) (RS-BEKK-GARCH) model. The model is a state-dependent bivariate BEKK-GARCH model and an extension of Gray's univariate generalized regime-switching (GRS) model to the bivariate case. To solve the path-dependency problem inherent in the bivariate regime switching BEKK-GARCH model, we propose a recombining method for the covariance term in the conditional variance-covariance matrix. The model is applied to estimate time-varying minimum variance hedge ratios for corn and nickel spot and futures prices. Out-of-sample point estimates of hedging portfolio variance show that compared to the state-in dependent BEKK-GARCH model, the RS-BEKK-GARCH model improves out-of-sample hedging effectiveness for both corn and nickel data. We perform White's (2000) data-snooping reality check to test for predictive superiority of RS-BEKK-GARCH over the benchmark model and find that the difference in variance reduction between BEKK-GARCH and RS-BEKK-GARCH is not statistically significant for either data set at conventional confidence levels.[[note]]SSC
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