1,869 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
K-theory for group C*-algebras
No full textThese notes are based on a lecture course given by the first author in the Sedano Winter School on K-theory held in Sedano, Spain, on January 22-27th of 2007. They aim at introducing K-theory of C*-algebras, equivariant K-homology and KK-theory in the context of the Baum-Connes conjectur
Three essays on wildfire economics and policy
Get PDFThesis (Ph.D.), School of Economic Sciences, Washington State UniversitySchool of Economic Sciences, Washington State Universit
On the Douglas-Rachford splitting method and the proximal point algorithm for maximal monotone operators
Get PDFCover title. "This paper consists mainly of dissertation research results of the first author."--Cover.Includes bibliographical references (p. 31-34).Research supported in part by the Army Research Office. DAAL03-86-K-0171 Research supported in part by the National Science Foundation. ECS-8519058by Jonathan Eckstein, Dimitri P. Bertsekas
Paranoia and irony in the Anglophone dectective narrative and the novels of Umberto Eco
Get PDFThe thesis provides a reading of Umberto Eco's three novels, The Name of the
Rose, Foucault's Pendulum, and The Island of the Day Before, that, while it
acknowledges the importance of the Italian literary tradition in which they stand, also
seeks to explain why their author appeals so frequently to literary models outside
Italy, and in particular the Anglo-American detective genre.
Chapter One explains Eco's relationship to the development of Italian literature
through his lifetime. It is noted that Eco is beginning, both in his semiotics and his
fiction, from a position where post-structuralism has been extensively explored by
neo-avant-gardew riters. Eco positions himself alongsides uchw riters as Italo Calvino
and Jorge Luis Borges, who wish to explore the ludic possibilities of working within
structures, while all the time acknowledging the epistemological limitations of so
doing. Eco's chosen structure, more often than not, is the highly defined genre of
the detective story.
From here, the following chapters engage in close readings of the three novels,
with particular emphasis on The Name of the Rose and Foucault's Pendulum,
demonstrating that they explore problems of interpretation central to the detective
narrative. In doing this, they display an intimate knowledge of generic developments
within the detective tradition, and of the philosophical and aesthetic uses made of the
genre by other writers. The embedding of intertextual references to other detective
narratives within Eco's novels is an important factor, as they come together to form
a narrative of epistemological inquiry that itself follows Eco's philosophical progress
through the years. In short, the novels, inter alia, map a systematic inquiry into the
possibility of systematic inquiry. They reserve the space to engage in such an ironic
and self-referential project precisely through their fictionality
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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