ALBERT

Description: This study uses Monte Carlo analysis to characterize the uncertainty associated with per-ton damage estimates for 565 electric generating units (EGUs) in the contiguous United States (U.S.) This analysis focuses on damage estimates produced by an Integrated Assessment Model (IAM) for emissions of five local air pollutants: sulfur dioxide (SO 2 ), nitrogen oxides (NO x ), volatile organic compounds (VOCs), ammonia (NH 3 ), and fine particulate matter (PM 2.5 ). For each power plant and pollutant, the Monte Carlo procedure yields an empirical distribution for the damage per ton, or marginal damage. The paper links uncertainty in marginal damages to air pollution policy in two ways. First, the paper characterizes uncertainty in the magnitude of the marginal damages which is relevant to policymakers in determining the stringency of pollution controls. Second, the paper explores uncertainty in the relative damages across power plants. Relative damages are important if policymakers elect to design efficient regulations that vary in stringency according to where emissions are released. The empirical section of the paper finds that the marginal damage distributions are positively skewed and they are more variable for sources in urban areas than rural locations. The paper finds that uncertainty in three input parameters has the greatest impact on uncertainty in the magnitude of damages: the adult mortality dose-response parameter, the mortality valuation parameter, and air quality modeling. The analysis also finds that for each pollutant except for NO x only uncertainty in air quality modeling impacts efficient trading ratios calibrated to each firm's marginal damages.

Description: This paper estimates the pattern of consumer expenditures in Iran in an attempt to measure the welfare cost of price subsidies in that country and shed light on possible fiscal reforms. We use the Quadratic Almost Ideal Demand System (Banks et al. (1997)) as our framework for estimation. We show that the general equilibrium fiscal interaction effects play a crucial role in determining the amount the government saves by eliminating the price subsidy of a particular good. Interestingly, eliminating price subsidies on utilities saves the government little by way of revenues and is welfare reducing. Comparing the gains for non-marginal with marginal reforms a la Ahmad and Stern (1984), we also show that the two approaches may not necessarily recommend the same reform.

Description: This paper presents an experiment measuring how lab-induced group identity affects trust and trustworthiness in a repeated trust game with random matching. Identity had positive in-group and negative out-group effects on trust. However, the in-group effect was small and statistically insignificant, while the out-group effect was large. Trustworthiness was determined mainly by reciprocity effects.

Description: We construct daily market-based measures of distance to default for large U.S. financial institutions since 1973. These measures have significant predictive power for institution bankruptcy more than one year in advance. We aggregate the distances to default across institutions to provide an index of the overall health of the financial-services industry. We show that deteriorations in this Financial Institution Health Index are associated with tighter lending standards and higher interest rates on bank loans and precede declines in employment and industrial production. We argue that this points to the condition of financial institutions as an independent source of macroeconomic variability, distinct from traditional accelerator mechanisms.

Description: We investigate the effect of immigration on the labor supply of skilled women, using data on Spain’s large recent immigration wave. We adopt a spatial correlations approach and instrument for current immigration using ethnic networks. We find that female immigration increases the local availability of household services and reduces their price. It also increases the labor supply of skilled native women, by allowing them to return to work earlier after childbirth, and to continue working while caring for elderly dependents. Immigration can account for one third of the recent increase in the employment rate of college-educated women providing child or elderly care.

Description: This paper investigates the standard finding that instituting a minimum quality standard within a vertically differentiated market unambiguously benefits consumers of high quality products. A competitive model is specified in which random cost shocks lead some firms to cheat in equilibrium on their reputation for high quality. When cheating occurs, instituting or raising the level of a minimum standard can lead to the price of high quality products either increasing or decreasing. The effect of a minimum quality standard on the price of high quality products becomes an empirical rather than a theoretical issue.

Description: We provide a unified assessment of a striking disparity in the United States: the differential rate at which white and black infants die. We separate the overall mortality gap into three temporal components—fitness at birth, conditional neonatal mortality, and conditional post-neonatal mortality—and quantify the extent to which each of the components can be predicted using a flexible reweighting method. Almost 90 percent of the overall mortality gap is due to differential fitness at birth, little of which can be predicted by racial differences in background characteristics. The remaining mortality gap stems from conditional post-neonatal mortality differences, nearly all of which can be predicted by background characteristics. The predictability of the mortality gap has declined substantially over the past two decades, largely because the mortality gap among extremely low-fitness infants is increasingly unrelated to background characteristics.

Description: We develop a duopoly model with advertising supported platforms and analyze incentives of a superior firm to license its advanced technologies to an inferior rival. We highlight the role of two technologies characteristic for media platforms: the technology to produce content and to place advertisements. Licensing incentives are driven solely by indirect network effects arising from the aversion of users to advertising. We establish a relationship between licensing incentives and the nature of technology, the decision variable on the advertiser side, and the structure of platforms’ revenues. Only the technology to place advertisements is licensed. If users are charged for access, licensing incentives vanish. Licensing increases the advertising intensity, benefits advertisers and harms users. Our model provides a rationale for technology-based cooperations between competing platforms, such as the planned Yahoo-Google advertising agreement in 2008.

Description: Optimal recycling of minerals can be thought of as an integral part of the theory of the mine. In this paper, we consider the role that wastewater recycling plays in the optimal extraction of groundwater, a renewable resource. We develop a two-sector dynamic optimization model to solve for the optimal trajectories of groundwater extraction and water recycling. For the case of spatially increasing recycling costs, recycled water serves as a supplemental resource in transition to the steady state. For constant unit recycling cost, recycled wastewater is eventually used as a sector-specific backstop for agricultural users, while desalination supplements household groundwater in the steady state. In both cases, recycling water increases welfare by shifting demand away from the aquifer, thus delaying implementation of costly desalination. The model provides guidance on when and how much to develop resource alternatives.

Description: This paper investigates whether rent control affects community socioeconomic composition. In particular, do rent controls increase the presence of poor and minority residents in a locale? Theoretically, the effect of rent control on community composition is ambiguous, as it depends upon several factors including willingness to occupy controlled apartments, landlord imposed rationing mechanisms, and spillover effects of rent controlled housing on uncontrolled units. Using census data on how Cambridge, Massachusetts and nearby communities responded to the state imposed end of rent control, I find evidence that rent control increased the presence of minority residents but also decreased the proportion of poor residents. This evidence is robust to alternate control areas and several specification checks. I also find that despite its positive impact on minority membership, rent control is associated with an increase in traditional measures of residential segregation.