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"This paper considers the role of incentive based climate adaptation policies. It uses the early literature on pricing and capacity choices under demand uncertainty to describe how revised price structures for the substitutes for climate services can be treated as anticipatory adaptation. In many situations the policies determining the prices of these services make them difficult to adjust. Thus, excess demand will not be managed through price adjustment. This situation is important because it implies that the rationing rules determining who is served influence both capacity planning and pricing decisions. The lesson drawn from these models is that reform of pricing policy for climate substitutes offers a ready basis for incentive based adaptation policy. The last part of the paper offers some empirical evidence on how the price elasticity of the residential demand for water changes with variations in seasonal precipitation. The findings suggest marked differences between normal and dry conditions for the Phoenix metropolitan area. These results reinforce the need to co-ordinate changes in pricing policy with any capacity planning developed for water supplies as part of anticipatory climate adaptation. Similar relationships may well apply for other substitutes for climatic services"--National Bureau of Economic Research web site

"This paper proposes the use of consumers' preferences in formulating policies for keeping secret information about terrorist activities and threats that might compromise future security. We report the results from two surveys indicating that people have clear preferences for full disclosure of some terrorist related information regardless of its consequences for specific industries or future threats. This result is especially clear for threats involving commercial airlines. For those threats associated with more general surveillance or threats to the financial system respondents were more willing to allow government authorities to withhold information"--National Bureau of Economic Research web site

AbstractThe United States is the world's largest donor of humanitarian assistance. However, that aid's effectiveness is hampered by decades‐old rules that restrict where food aid commodities are purchased and how they are transported to recipient countries. This paper evaluates costs associated with one of those restrictions—food aid cargo preference—which requires that at least half of all U.S. food aid shipped in a given year be carried on U.S.‐flagged vessels. The empirical analysis presented in this study, based on individual food aid shipments between January 2012 and May 2015, indicates that cargo preference added $42 million annually to program costs.

We examine the relationship between population characteristics and price dispersion for 75 prescription drugs in five markets. Based on models of price dispersion, we consider that search costs are likely lower for the elderly, who are repeat purchasers. Expected benefits from search are likely higher for low‐income households, who lack insurance. Our results are consistent with the hypothesis that for communities with a large percentage of elderly and poor population, search effort is greater for pharmaceutical drugs, causing lower price dispersion. By understanding the characteristics of who searches for low drug prices, we begin to identify the motives of consumers that might also lead to search for the lowest cost healthcare provider or lowest cost insurance. The results suggest that the Medicare legislation that attempts to close the pharmaceutical doughnut hole may reduce search by the elderly, increase price dispersion, and potentially increase the average price of prescription drugs. (JEL D12, D83, I1, I18)

AbstractThe new Supplemental Agricultural Disaster Assistance (SURE) program, established by the 2008 Farm Bill, mandates disaster payments for individual farms that experience crop losses in excess of 50% of their average production, whether or not those farms are located in regions affected by catastrophic events. This study shows that, because of this provision, the SURE program creates substantial incentives for moral hazard behaviors in many market‐related situations. These incentives are especially severe when market prices equal or fall below prices at which farmers value commodity losses for federal crop insurance purposes.