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Alternative Methods of Marginal Abatement Cost Estimation: Non- Parametric Si Stance Functions
This project implements a economic methodology to measure the marginal abatement costs of pollution by measuring the lost revenue implied by an incremental reduction in pollution. It utilizes observed performance, or `best practice`, of facilities to infer the marginal abatement cost. The initial stage of the project is to use data from an earlier published study on productivity trends and pollution in electric utilities to test this approach and to provide insights on its implementation to issues of cost-benefit analysis studies needed by the Department of Energy. The basis for this marginal abatement cost estimation is a relationship between the outputs and the inputs of a firm or plant. Given a fixed set of input resources, including quasi-fixed inputs like plant and equipment and variable inputs like labor and fuel, a firm is able to produce a mix of outputs. This paper uses this theoretical view of the joint production process to implement a methodology and obtain empirical estimates of marginal abatement costs. These estimates are compared to engineering estimates
Defense Against Drought
This fact sheet outlines six tools that can be used to help alleviate some of the negative impacts of drought and help improve returns to crop production
Nitrogen Fertilizer Guide for First-Year Small Grains Following Alfalfa
Nitrogen (N) fertilizer is one of the most expensive crop inputs. It is an essential nutrient for most crops and often increases yield more than any other nutrient. Small grains are no exception. Alfalfa is the dominant crop in Utah in terms of area and gross sales, and as a nitrogen-fixing legume, it does not require nitrogen fertilizer. When terminated, alfalfa usually leaves a lot of nitrogen in the soil for subsequent crops. The amount of nitrogen that it supplies to following crops has been termed the âalfalfa N credit.â In many cases, this credit can be up to 300 lbs. N/acre for the two crops following alfalfa. This fact sheet addresses the nitrogen fertilizer needs of small grains grown for forage and for grain and corresponding economics
Systematic Bailout Guarantees and Tacit Coordination
Both the academic literature and the policy debate on systematic bailout guarantees and Government subsidies have ignored an important effect: in industries where firms may go out of business due to idiosyncratic shocks, Governments may increase the likelihood of (tacit) coordination if they set up schemes that rescue failing firms. In a repeated-game setting, we show that a systematic bailout regime increases the expected profits from coordination and simultaneously raises the probability that competitors will remain in business and will thus be able to âpunishâ firms that deviate from coordinated behaviour. These effects make tacit coordination easier to sustain and have a detrimental impact on welfare. While the key insight holds across any industry, we study this question with an application to the banking sector, in light of the recent financial crisis and the extensive use of bailout schemes
Properties of hadron screening masses at small baryonic density
The properties of hadron screening masses around the deconfinement phase
transition at finite baryonic density can be studied by evaluating the Taylor
coefficients with respect to the iso-scalar and iso-vector chemical potentials.
We simulate 2-flavour lattice QCD with staggered fermions on a 12*12*24*6
lattice with ma = 0.05 and 0.10 and report investigations of nucleon,
pseudo-scalar and vector mesons. We present new, strong evidence that in the
confining phase, the screening masses at vanishing chemical potential have
significant temperature dependence, but the effect of the iso-scalar chemical
potential is very small. Above the critical temperature, the second derivative
terms of mesons rapidly increase as contrasted to the case of baryon. We also
study the responses of the screening masses to an iso-vector chemical potential
and discuss some of the issues related to the properties of hadron masses at
finite density.Comment: 7 pages with 5 figures; added two new references, the title of
article and the section 'Concluding Remarks' are slightly change
Effects of in-medium vector meson masses on low-mass dileptons from SPS heavy-ion collisions
Using a relativistic transport model to describe the expansion of the
fire-cylinder formed in the initial stage of heavy-ion collisions at SPS/CERN
energies, we study the production of dileptons with mass below about 1 GeV from
these collisions. The initial hadron abundance and their momentum distributions
in the fire-cylinder are determined by following the general features of the
results from microscopic models based on the string dynamics and further
requiring that the final proton and pion spectra and rapidity distributions are
in agreement with available experimental data. For dilepton production, we
include the Dalitz decay of , , , and
mesons, the direct decay of primary , and mesons, and
the pion-pion annihilation that proceeds through the meson, the
pion-rho annihilation that proceeds through the meson, and the
kaon-antikaon annihilation that proceeds through the meson. We find that
the modification of vector meson properties, especially the decrease of their
mass due to the partial restoration of chiral symmetry, in hot and dense
hadronic matter, provides a quantitative explanation of the recently observed
enhancement of low-mass dileptons by the CERES collaboration in central S+Au
collisions and by the HELIOS-3 collaboration in central S+W collisions.Comment: 46 pages, LaTeX, figures available from [email protected], to appear
in Nucl. Phys.
Two problems in thermal field theory
In this talk, I review recent progress made in two areas of thermal field
theory. In particular, I discuss various approaches for the calculation of the
quark gluon plasma thermodynamical properties, and the problem of its photon
production rate.Comment: 10 pages Latex document, 15 postscript figures. Invited talk given at
the 6th Workshop on High Energy Particle Physics, Chennai, India, 3-15 Jan
200
Heavy Quark Potentials in Quenched QCD at High Temperature
Heavy quark potentials are investigated at high temperatures. The temperature
range covered by the analysis extends from values just below the
deconfinement temperature up to about in the deconfined phase. We
simulated the pure gauge sector of QCD on lattices with temporal extents of 4,
6 and 8 with spatial volumes of . On the smallest lattice a tree level
improved action was employed while in the other two cases the standard Wilson
action was used. Below we find a temperature dependent logarithmic term
contributing to the confinement potential and observe a string tension which
decreases with rising temperature but retains a finite value at the
deconfinement transition. Above the potential is Debye-screened, however
simple perturbative predictions do not apply.Comment: 20 pages, 9 figure
The Threat of Capital Drain: A Rationale for Public Banks?
This paper yields a rationale for why subsidized public banks may be desirable from a regional perspective in a financially integrated economy. We present a model with credit rationing and heterogeneous regions in which public banks prevent a capital drain from poorer to richer regions by subsidizing local depositors, for example, through a public guarantee. Under some conditions, cooperative banks can perform the same function without any subsidization; however, they may be crowded out by public banks. We also discuss the impact of the political structure on the emergence of public banks in a political-economy setting and the role of interregional mobility
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