The economic value of remote sensing of earth resources from space: An ERTS overview and the value of continuity of service. Volume 3: Intensive use of living resources: Agriculture. Part 1: Overview

Potential economic benefits obtainable from a state-of-the-art ERS system in the resource area of intensive use of living resources, agriculture, are studied. A spectrum of equal capability (cost saving), increased capability, and new capability benefits are quantified. These benefits are estimated via ECON developed models of the agricultural marketplace and include benefits of improved production and distribution of agricultural crops. It is shown that increased capability benefits and new capability benefits result from a reduction of losses due to disease and insect infestation given ERS's capability to distinguish crop vigor and from the improvement in world trade negotiations given ERS's worldwide surveying capability

Contracts between Legal Persons

Contract law and the economics of contract have, for the most part, developed independently of each other. In this essay, we briefly review the notion of a contract from the perspective of lawyer, and then use this framework to organize the economics literature on contract. The title, Contracts between Legal Persons, limits the review to that part of contract law that is generic to any legal person. A legal person is any individual, firm or government agency with the right to enter into binding agreements. Our goal is to discuss the role of the law in enforcing these agreements under the hypothesis that the legal persons have well defined goals and objectives.contract law, law and economics, contract breach, contract theory, incomplete contracts

The Value of Life

This comment asks, in the context of cost-benefit analysis, what consistency requires. How much variation, if any, in valuation of life is justifiable? Inevitably, questions concerning the moral foundations of economic valuations of life will arise. Section 1 presents some evidence of variation among agency and academic valuations of life. It also outlines three different approaches to evaluation of health and safety projects. The variation detailed at the outset of section 1 is among aggregate, preference-based values of life. The subsequent discussion argues for the following claims. First, the most justifiable, economic approach to the evaluation of health and safety regulation is a highly disaggregated, preference-based one. The value of life as usually calculated provides an inadequate and inappropriate summary statistic on which to make decisions concerning the prevention of risks to life. Second, even the most acceptable of the commonly used preference-based approaches has several counterintuitive policy implications, the most dramatic of which are: (a) It favors the lives of the rich over the lives of the poor; (b) it favors acute over preventive interventions; (c) on plausible assumptions, it favors the aged over the young; and (d) it will often recommend policies that do not maximize the number of lives saved for a given expenditure. The wealth bias, and in part the age bias, can be avoided by using hypothetical preferences normalized to some wealth standard; section 3 suggests a simple, and implementable procedure, of normalization

Governance Structures, Legal Systems, and the Concept of Law

Debate over the concept of law currently contrasts conceptual and interpretive accounts. This Article begins to elaborate a social-scientific conception of law as a subset of a concept of a governance structure. To begin, it distinguishes institutional structures, realized institutions, and functioning institutions. Governance structures consist of institutional structures that perform central tasks of governance. Dworkin\u27s interpretive conception of law extends over the domain of functioning institutions; positivist, conceptual accounts of law extend over the domain of institutional structures. From this perspective legal systems may be best understood as governance structures that satisfy the political value legality; different concepts of law offer different accounts of the value of legality and its relation to other political values of justice

The Value of Life

This comment asks, in the context of cost-benefit analysis, what consistency requires. How much variation, if any, in valuation of life is justifiable? Inevitably, questions concerning the moral foundations of economic valuations of life will arise. Section 1 presents some evidence of variation among agency and academic valuations of life. It also outlines three different approaches to evaluation of health and safety projects. The variation detailed at the outset of section 1 is among aggregate, preference-based values of life. The subsequent discussion argues for the following claims. First, the most justifiable, economic approach to the evaluation of health and safety regulation is a highly disaggregated, preference-based one. The value of life as usually calculated provides an inadequate and inappropriate summary statistic on which to make decisions concerning the prevention of risks to life. Second, even the most acceptable of the commonly used preference-based approaches has several counterintuitive policy implications, the most dramatic of which are: (a) It favors the lives of the rich over the lives of the poor; (b) it favors acute over preventive interventions; (c) on plausible assumptions, it favors the aged over the young; and (d) it will often recommend policies that do not maximize the number of lives saved for a given expenditure. The wealth bias, and in part the age bias, can be avoided by using hypothetical preferences normalized to some wealth standard; section 3 suggests a simple, and implementable procedure, of normalization

Governance Structures, Legal Systems, and the Concept of Law

Debate over the concept of law currently contrasts conceptual and interpretive accounts. This Article begins to elaborate a social-scientific conception of law as a subset of a concept of a governance structure. To begin, it distinguishes institutional structures, realized institutions, and functioning institutions. Governance structures consist of institutional structures that perform central tasks of governance. Dworkin\u27s interpretive conception of law extends over the domain of functioning institutions; positivist, conceptual accounts of law extend over the domain of institutional structures. From this perspective legal systems may be best understood as governance structures that satisfy the political value legality; different concepts of law offer different accounts of the value of legality and its relation to other political values of justice