1,721,013 research outputs found
Increasing CAFE Standards: Still a Very Bad Idea
Full text linkIn a recent Joint Center Working Paper, Gerard and Lave respond to our recent work critiquing proposed increases in existing Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards. Gerard and Laveassert that, at least in the right environment, there is a place for CAFE standards. We suggest, however, that Gerard and Lavehave not really made any dent in our arguments, and have not provided any rationale for the CAFE program to exist. Indeed, much of the Gerard and Lave'sargument is self-contradictory.
Is EPA's Ozone Standard Feasible?
Full text linkThe Environmental Protection Agency's estimate of the cost of meeting the new health-based ozone standard is likely to underestimate substantially the actual cost. EPA's cost estimates unrealistically assume that pollution control costs are capped at 5 trillion in one city, and 10 billion per year by orders of magnitude. I also find that the incremental costs of control are likely to far exceed any estimates of incremental benefits. The high cost of meeting the ozone standard strongly suggests that it is likely to be infeasible in several cities. To avoid having EPA set such infeasible standards, Congress should amend the Clean Air Act to require the agency to balance the benefits and costs of regulation.
An Analysis of the Use of EPA's Clean Air Benefit Estimates in OMB's Draft Report on the Costs and Benefits of Regulation
Full text linkMany advocates of regulatory reform recommend more and better benefit-cost analyses. Perhaps the single most ambitious and sophisticated such analysis ever conducted is the retrospective report on the benefits and costs of clean air recently completed by the Environmental Protection Agency. But EPA's estimates of trillions of dollars in benefits from the Clean Air Act depend on a few arbitrary assumptions about the nature and value of health improvements. Although a panel of well-respected scientists and economists reviewed the EPA's report, the Office of Management and Budget should not include it in its own report to Congress without more extensive discussion of key limitations. In particular, OMB should include a quantitative illustration of how alternative assumptions as plausible as those in the EPA report could shrink the expected value of benefits to a fraction of those reported.
Litigating Lead-Based Paint Hazards: Is It a Solution?
Full text linkNone.Environment, Health and Safety, Regulatory Reform
Regulating Mercury Emissions: What Do We Know About Costs and Benefits?
Full text linkUnited States policymakers are concerned with mercury emissions because mercury has potentially adverse effects on children whose mothers consumed contaminated fish while pregnant. Congress and the Environmental Protection Agency are considering different proposals to cut or even eliminate mercury emissions from oil and coal-fired power plants. We compare the cost of cutting power plants' mercury emissions with the likely reductions in the number of cases of subtle neurological effects. Given current scientific understanding, the health and environmental improvements are very unlikely to provide an economic justification for the costs of stringent controls on mercury emissions. In addition, if Congress or EPA were to regulate mercury emissions from power plants, an approach that used prices would be more efficient than one that limited the quantity of mercury emissions. For a related paper, see Health Risks From Mercury-Contaminated Fish: A Reassessment.
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Full text linkWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
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