BIO-ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT OF FLOODPLAINS: FARMING VERSUS FISHING IN BANGLADESH

This paper explores the linkages of environment and economic development in the floodplain of large rivers. There is considerable evidence that even the most vital floodplains in the world are not being managed efficiently and both economic and ecological factors need to be considered for effective management. Floodplain management policies in Bangladesh emphasize structural changes to enhance agricultural production. However, these structural changes reduce fisheries production, where the fishery is an important natural resource sector and a source of subsistence for the rural poor. We develop a model where net returns to agriculture and fisheries are jointly maximized taking into account the effect of flooding depth and timing on production. Results for a region in Bangladesh show that optimal production in a natural floodplain yields higher net returns compared to a floodplain modified by flood control structures. This finding has important implications for management policies -- neglecting the bio-economic relationship between fisheries and land use may significantly affect the long-run economic role of a river floodplain, particularly in a poor country.Community/Rural/Urban Development,

Artificial intelligence in endoscopy: the challenges and future directions

Artificial intelligence based approaches, in particular deep learning, have achieved state-of-the-art performance in medical fields with increasing number of software systems being approved by both Europe and United States. This paper reviews their applications to early detection of oesophageal cancers with a focus on their advantages and pitfalls. The paper concludes with future recommendations towards the development of a real-time, clinical implementable, interpretable and robust diagnosis support systems

Phenomenology of a light scalar: the dilaton

We make use of the language of non-linear realizations to analyze electro-weak symmetry breaking scenarios in which a light dilaton emerges from the breaking of a nearly conformal strong dynamics, and compare the phenomenology of the dilaton to that of the well motivated light composite Higgs scenario. We argue that -- in addition to departures in the decay/production rates into massless gauge bosons mediated by the conformal anomaly -- characterizing features of the light dilaton scenario (as well as other scenarios admitting a light CP-even scalar not directly related to the breaking of the electro-weak symmetry) are off-shell events at high invariant mass involving two longitudinally polarized vector bosons and a dilaton, and tree-level flavor violating processes. Accommodating both electro-weak precision measurements and flavor constraints appears especially challenging in the ambiguous scenario in which the Higgs and the dilaton fields strongly mix. We show that warped higgsless models of electro-weak symmetry breaking are explicit and tractable realizations of this limiting case. The relation between the naive radion profile often adopted in the study of holographic realizations of the light dilaton scenario and the actual dynamical dilaton field is clarified in the Appendix.Comment: 21 page

Consolidation as a Regulatory Compliance Strategy: Small Drinking Water Systems and the Safe Drinking Water Act

Despite extensive research and policy initiatives to increase the technical, financial, and managerial capacity of small drinking water systems, there has been little research focusing on understanding how consolidation can increase the overall capacity of the drinking water industry. Consolidation of water systems may be a mechanism that increases regulatory compliance by removing poorly performing systems from the industry and replacing inefficient management and/or capital. The US drinking water system is highly fragmented, with over 50,000 Community Water Systems (CWSs), of which the vast majority are classified as "small" by the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). A discrete choice model is employed to determine the characteristics shared by small water systems that are acquired. On average, these acquired firms are small, have frequent drinking water violations, are privately-owned, and purchase their water from another system. These results suggest that consolidation may have an important role to play in increasing overall industry compliance with the Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA).Community Water System, Drinking Water, Merger, Consolidation, Resource /Energy Economics and Policy, Q25, Q53,

Optimal Taxation of Externalities Interacting through Markets: A Theoretical General Equilibrium Analysis

This study develops a theoretical general equilibrium model to examine optimal externality tax policy in the presence of externalities linked to one another through markets rather than technical production relationships. Analytical results reveal that the second-best externality tax rate may be greater or less than the first-best rate, depending largely on the elasticity of substitution between the two externality-generating products. These results are explored empirically for the case of greenhouse gas from fossil fuel and nitrogen emissions associated with biofuels.second-best tax, multiple externalities, biofuel, GHG emissions, nitrogen leaching

Comment on ''Understanding the Area Proposal for Extremal Black Hole Entropy''

A. Ghosh and P. Mitra made the proposal how to explain the area law for the entropy of extreme black holes in some model calculations. I argue that their approach implicitly operates with strongly singular geometries and says nothing about the contribution of regular metrics of extreme black holes into the partition function.Comment: 5 pages, ReVTeX, no figures. Expanded from the journal version to include response to Ghosh and Mitra Reply

STOCHASTIC TECHNOLOGY, RISK PREFERENCES, AND THE USE OF POLLUTING INPUTS

We investigate the comparative static effects of environmental and agricultural policies on pesticide and fertilizer use. Since such effects depend on technology and risk preference parameters, we estimate these from a panel data set of Illinois farms. Generalized method of moments is used on a set of nonlinear first order conditions.Environmental Economics and Policy,