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Author: Denise Marie Jarvinen
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 236
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Author: Denise Marie Jarvinen
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 236
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Author: Hilary Sigman
Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing
ISBN:
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 528
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Book Description
Professor Sigman has selected the most authoritative previously published papers for this pathbreaking collection. This timely book examines private decision-making and government policy for the management of hazardous waste, the clean-up of contaminated land and the redevelopment of brownfield sites. Issues explored include the success of economic incentive policies such as 'green taxes' and tort liability, environmental decentralization and attitudes toward risk by both regulators and households. The additional focus on empirical analysis will help economists understand this challenging public policy area and will make economic insights accessible to policymakers.
Author: Richard C. Porter
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136524371
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 520
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Book Description
In this concise, engaging, and provocative work, Richard Porter introduces readers to the economic tools that can be applied to problems involved in handling a diverse range of waste products from business and households. Emphasizing the impossibility of achieving a zero-risk environment, Porter focuses on the choices that apply in real world decisions about waste. Acknowledging that effective waste policy integrates knowledge from several disciplines, Porter focuses on the use of economic analysis to reveal the costs of different policies and therefore how much can be done to meet goals to protect human health and the environment. With abundant examples, he considers subjects such as landfills, incineration, and illegal disposal. He discusses the international trade in waste, the costs and benefits of recycling, and special topics such as hazardous materials, Superfund, and nuclear waste. While making clear his belief that not every form of waste presents the same amount of risk, Porter stresses the need for open-minded approaches to developing new policies. For students, policymakers, and general readers, he provides insight and accessibility to a subject that others might leave out-of-sight, out-of-mind, or buried under an impenetrable prose of statistics and jargon.
Author: Adam Matthew Domanski
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 119
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Book Description
Keywords: Economics, environment, discrete choice, hazardous waste, smart growth.
Author: Sara Aghakazemjourabbaf
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Copper
Languages : en
Pages : 128
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Book Description
This thesis contains three essays spanning the fields of environmental economics and investment in a non-renewable resource under uncertainty. All essays relate to the analysis of the clean-up of hazardous waste resulting from natural resource extraction. The first essay addresses the problem of inadequate hazardous waste clean-up by resource extraction firms. It compares the impacts of an environmental bond and a strict liability rule on a firm's ongoing waste abatement and eventual site clean-up decisions. The firm's problem is modeled as a stochastic optimal control problem that results in a system of Hamilton Jacobi Bellman equations. The model is applied to a typical copper mine in Canada. The resource price is modelled as a stochastic differential equation, which is calibrated to copper futures prices using a Kalman filtering approach. A numerical solution is implemented to determine the optimal abatement and extraction rates as well as the critical levels of copper prices that would motivate a firm to clean up the accumulated waste under each policy. We have found that the effect of an environmental bond relative to the strict liability rule depends on certain key characteristics of the bond - in particular whether the bond pays interest and whether the firm borrows at a premium above the risk-free rate to fund the bond. If the firm can borrow at the risk-free rate, and if the government pays the risk-free interest rate on the bond, the value of the mine prior to construction, optimal abatement rates, and optimal operating decisions are the same under the bonding policy and strict liability rule. In contrast, if no interest is paid on the bond, the value of the project is reduced compared to the strict liability rule and the firm undertakes a larger amount of waste abatement under the bond. Because the mine is less pro table, it is less likely that the firm will invest in this mine. In the more realistic case that the firm borrows to fund the bond at a premium over the risk-free rate, the value of mine is reduced further and waste abatement levels are increased. The prospect of investment in the mine is even less likely compared to the previous case. The model developed in the first essay allows that the firm temporarily mothballs the project, but eventually clean-up must occur at the end of the project life. However, the possibility of firm bankruptcy was not explicitly included in that model, and thus mothballing is the only option available to the firm to delay waste clean-up. The second essay contributes to our previous study by considering another important option available to the firm, i.e., the possibility of declaring bankruptcy. A firm's decision to declare bankruptcy is specified as a Poisson process that treats bankruptcy as an exogenous, risky event governed by a hazard rate. The hazard rate at a project level depends on waste stock and output prices, while at the company wide level depends on the commodity prices only. For both default scenarios, the paper demonstrates that the firm operating under a bonding policy, that covers the full cost of waste clean-up, is less able to avoid its liability costs, particularly if the bond is financed from retained earnings. If the firm borrows to finance the bond, it is possible that the firm avoids clean-up costs by defaulting on the loan following a bankruptcy. In contrast to the results of the first essay, if the firm finances the bond out of its retained earnings, and if the government pays the risk-free rate of interest on the bond, the bond and the strict liability rule do not give the same outcome when bankruptcy is possible. Such a bond encourages a higher abatement rate and makes site clean-up more likely compared to the strict liability rule. Firms operating under the liability rule have stronger incentives to delay their clean-up costs by sitting idle and they may eventually go bankrupt at the mothballed stage. Therefore, the possibility of bankruptcy makes the firm worse off under the bonding policy, while benefits the firm under the strict liability rule. Modelling uncertain commodity prices is a key component of the analysis of optimal firm behavior in hazardous waste clean-up. The third essay investigates the dynamics of copper prices by comparing and contrasting three different stochastic models, which are a one-factor mean-reverting model, a two-factor model, and a one-factor long-term model. These models are calibrated to copper futures prices using a Kalman filtering approach. The first model assumes spot prices are mean-reverting in drift. The second model defines two correlated stochastic factors that are spot prices and convenience yield. The third model transforms the two-factor price model into a single factor model. We have found that the first model fails to describe the term structure of copper futures prices with long maturities. In contrast, the two-factor and the long-term models are shown to provide a reasonable fit of the term structure of copper futures prices and can be applied to long-term investment projects. The results highlight the importance of stochastic convenience yield in copper price formation.
Author: Hilary Sigman
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781785367021
Category : Electronic books
Languages : en
Pages : 489
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Book Description
Professor Sigman has selected the most authoritative previously published papers for this pathbreaking collection. This timely book examines private decision-making and government policy for the management of hazardous waste, the clean-up of contaminated land and the redevelopment of brownfield sites. Issues explored include the success of economic incentive policies such as 'green taxes' and tort liability, environmental decentralization and attitudes toward risk by both regulators and households. The additional focus on empirical analysis will help economists understand this challenging public policy area and will make economic insights accessible to policymakers.
Author: Justin Gallagher
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 232
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Book Description
The first chapter of the dissertation examines the learning process that economic agents use to update their expectation of an uncertain and infrequently observed event. The standard Bayesian updating model is restrictive in that it reflects the strong neo-classical assumption that economic agents efficiently incorporate new information with all available information when updating beliefs. I consider the case of flooding and estimate the effect of first-hand experience on flood insurance take-up. I compile a new nation-wide panel dataset of large regional floods and flood insurance policies in the US. First, I show that flood insurance take-up in flooded communities increases by 9% after a flood and then steadily declines, fully dissipating after 9 years. Floods do not affect take-up in geographically neighboring non-flooded communities unless these communities are in the same media market. The take-up rate in non-flooded communities that share a media market with a flooded community is one-third as large as in flooded communities. I interpret this evidence using the standard Beta-Bernoulli Bayesian learning model and a Beta-Bernoulli model that includes a forgetting/first-hand experience parameter. I find that the standard Bayesian model can not explain both the spike in insurance in the year of a flood and the decay rate of this effect on insurance take-up in the years after the flood. I conclude that the evidence is most consistent with a Bayesian model augmented with a forgetting/first-hand experience parameter. The second chapter of my dissertation examines the causal link between localized exposure to hazardous waste pollutants from motor vehicle exhaust and adverse human health outcomes for newborns. I explore whether an exogenous event--the 1994 Northridge Earthquake--can be used as a quasi-experiment to test how birth outcomes change from a sudden and unexpected increase in pollution. The Northridge Earthquake closed down portions of four busy highways in Los Angeles, CA for periods of 1-6 months. The highway traffic was diverted onto secondary roads that previous to the earthquake had a much lower traffic volume. The paper focuses on two health outcomes for newborns: birth weight and gestation period. Infants born preterm or with low birth weight are less likely to survive infancy, more likely to suffer from childhood illness, and have lower future earnings. Overall the results of this study are inconclusive due to the relatively small number of new births included in the sample design. However, the results do suggest that a mother's race, age, and level of education are more important than proximity to a highway. Being a minority race, a teenage mother, or not having any college education are correlated with lower birth weight. The size of these correlations are approximately an order of magnitude larger than the point estimates for the effect of living in close proximity to a road with heavy traffic. The third chapter of the dissertation uses the housing market to develop estimates of the local welfare impacts of Superfund sponsored clean-ups of hazardous waste sites. We show that if consumers value the clean-ups, then the hedonic model predicts that they will lead to increases in local housing prices and new home construction, as well as the migration of individuals that place a high value on environmental quality to the areas near the improved sites. We compare housing market outcomes in the areas surrounding the first 400 hazardous waste sites chosen for Superfund clean-ups to the areas surrounding the 290 sites that narrowly missed qualifying for these clean-ups. We find that Superfund clean-ups are associated with economically small and statistically indistinguishable from zero local changes in residential property values, property rental rates, housing supply, total population, and the types of individuals living near the sites. These findings are robust to a series of specification checks, including the application of a regression discontinuity design based on knowledge of the selection rule. Overall, the preferred estimates suggest that the local benefits of Superfund clean-ups are small and appear to be substantially lower than the $43 million mean cost of Superfund clean-ups.
Author: Energy Resources Co
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 542
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Author: Katy Bisson
Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing
ISBN:
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 232
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Nine papers were commissioned on specific topics to mostly British researchers in social sciences in order to approach the unity of approach and breadth of coverage that a single-author might achieve. The goal is to fill the gap between studies of waste that focus narrowly on such problems as pollution and management, and economic studies that do not mention waste at all. They cover physical and historical perspectives, waste policy, and specific waste issues. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
Author: Hans W. Gottinger
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780948061622
Category : Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 23
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