The 1996 Safe Drinking Water Act Amendments required that water utilities send quality reports to customers. We test whether receiving such reports of health violations increases purchases of bottled water using newly released data and disaggregate changes in demand at the intensive and...

Invasive insect species represent perhaps one of the most significant potential sources of economic risk to U.S. agricultural production. Private control of invasive insect species is likely to be insufficient due to negative externality and weaker-link public good problems. In this study, we...

This paper is based on our ongoing joint work with Ravi Kanbur. Xi Chen is grateful to Ravi Kanbur for invaluable comments, guidance and encouragement. For comments and suggestions, please direct correspondence to Xi Chen at xc49@cornell.edu.

The distribution of income and wealth resulting from risk-taking behavior significantly affects cooperation and risk-sharing in many areas in many governmental programs, including health insurance and agricultural production. This paper studies redistributive decision making and fairness...

Following Hurricane Katrina, the United States government provided $45 billion in loans and rebuilding funds to individuals and businesses for the purpose of repairing the damage caused by the hurricane. However, it is not yet clear what impact this assistance had on small businesses in affected...

In most developing countries wastewater treatment systems have very low coverage or function poorly, resulting in large-scale water pollution and the use of poor-quality water for crop irrigation, especially in the vicinity of urban centres. This can pose significant risks to public health,...

This chapter argues that Australia’s labour market – indeed most capitalist labour markets – feature too much unemployment and underemployment and associated forms of labour market insecurity or disadvantage. The later term implies a weak or tenuous connection to the labour force through...

The main objective of this paper was to conduct Programs Budget Analysis of the water sub-sector in Uganda over the period 1999/00 to 2009/10 in order to gain an understanding of sources of funding and the way funds were allocated to different programs. This sub sector has been identified as one...

To ensure the availability of cleanup funds, federal regulators often require ex ante proof of ability-to-pay for future environmental liabilities. These regulations currently apply to hazardous waste managers under the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, and are being considered for...