Public action to prevent crime is often driven by concerns about public safety. But what generates those concerns ? ]s it crime, or something else ? Using survey data for Brazil, we find that the desire for greater public safety has a positive own-income effect, but a negative neighborhood-...

This review considers the role of environmental effects in transport investment appraisal, mainly from the perspective of cost-benefit analysis, the most widely adopted appraisal technique. Although the basic principles of CBA are straightforward, several complications are identified that may...

Optimal harvesting of prey in a predator–prey ecosystem is studied under the condition that the existence of the predator has value. Predators (birds) and humans (fishers) compete for prey (shellfish). The behavior of the system is studied and conditions for optimal control are deduced....

We analyze how the threat of a potential future regime shift affects optimal management. We use a simple general growth model to analyze four cases that involve combinations of stock collapse versus changes in system dynamics, and exogenous versus endogenous probabilities of regime shift. Prior...

This study uses a door-to-door fundraising field experiment to examine the impact of different payment options on charitable giving. Households are randomly divided into three treatments, distinguished by the possibility for respondents to donate cash, by debit card, or both. I find that due to...

Although many researchers have investigated the value of open space in cities, few of them have compared them to the costs of providing this amenity. In this paper, we use the monocentric model of a city to derive a simple cost-benefit rule for the optimal provision of open space. The rule is...

Lying to participants offers an experimenter the enticing prospect of making "others' behaviour" a controlled variable, but is eschewed by experimental economists because it may pollute the pool of subjects. This paper proposes and implements a new experimental design, the Conditional...

We compare a partners condition where the same small group of subjects plays a repeated public good game to a strangers condition where subjects play this game in changing group formations. Subjects in the partners condition contribute from the first period on significantly more to the public...