Biomass as Sustainable Energy: The Potential and Economic Impacts on U.S. Agriculture

This paper addresses the economic feasibility and impacts on U.S. agriculture of establishing a biomass crops industry capable of producing 8 quads methanol or 9.4 quads ethanol by the year 2030 from grasses grown as biomass feedstocks. The results suggest that such an industry could become commercially viable and that the agricultural economy would benefit. Producers of traditional and biomass crops would benefit most. While consumers and livestock producers would be worse off as a result of higher crop prices, society would gain from reduced government payments to crop producers and from lower levels of air pollution

Rebate Rules in Threshold Public Good Provision

This paper considers how six alternative rebate rules affect voluntary contributions in a threshold public-good experiment. The rules differ by (1) whether an individual can receive a proportional rebate of excess contributions, a winner-takes-all of any excess contributions, or a full rebate of one's contribution in the event the public good is provided and excess contributions exist, and (2) whether the probability of receiving a rebate is proportional to an individual's contribution relative to total contributions or is a simple uniform probability distribution set by the number of contributors. The paper adds to the existing experimental economics literature on threshold public goods by investigating both aggregate and individual demand revelation under the winner-take-all and random full-rebate rules. Half of the rules (proportional rebate, winner-take-all with uniform probability among all group members, and random full-rebate with uniform probability) provide total contributions that nearly equal total benefits, while the rest (winner-take-all with proportional probability, winner-take-all with uniform probability among contributors only, and random full-rebate with proportional probability) exceed benefits by over 30 percent. Only the proportional rebate rule is found to achieve both aggregate and individual demand revelation. Our experimental results have implications for both fundraisers and valuation practitioners.

Using Job Changes to Evaluate the Bias of the Value of a Statistical Life

This paper presents a new approach to obtain unbiased estimates of the value of a statistical life (VSL) with labor market data. Investigating job changes, we combine the advantages of recent panel studies, which allow to control for unobserved heterogeneity of workers, and conventional cross-sectional estimations, which primarily exploit the variation of wage and risk between different jobs. We find a VSL of 6.1 million euros from pooled cross-sectional estimation, 1.9 million euros from the static first-differences panel model and 3.5 million euros from the job-changer specification. Thus, ignoring individual heterogeneity causes overestimates of the VSL, whereas identifying the wage-risk tradeoff not only by means of between job variation (job-changer model) but also on the basis of noisy variation on the job (panel models) may lead to underestimates of the VSL. Our results can be used to perform cost-benefit analyses of public projects aimed at reducing fatality risks, e.g., in the domains of health, environmental or traffic policy

Working too much in a polluted world: A North-South evolutionary model

This paper examines a simple North-South growth model where negative externalities may contribute to reinforce economic growth. Agents' welfare depends on three goods in the model: leisure, a common access renewable natural resource (one in each hemisphere) and a non-storable consumption good. Production and consumption of the latter good deplete the renewable natural resource. To protect against such environmental deterioration, agents may increase their labor supply in order to produce an additional amount of the consumption good to be used as a substitute for the depleted natural resource. The consequent growth in production and consumption may generate a further depletion of the natural resource. This may lead to a self-enforcing growth process in a polluted world where individuals work and produce "too much" (i.e. more than socially optimal). We examine the choices of the two hemispheres using a two-population evolutionary game with transboundary pollution across hemispheres. Each agent chooses whether to work low or high. If an agent works low, she can consume the good only to satisfy basic needs (subsistence consumption). If the agent works high, she can consume an additional amount of the good as a substitute for the natural resource (substitution consumption). We assume that people who work high in the North can also have access to the Southern natural resource (e.g. they can afford a holiday in some developing country where natural resources are still relatively unpolluted), whereas the opposite is not true. We show that economic growth in the North and/or in the South may lead to stationary states that are Pareto dominated by states of the world with a lower level of production and consumption. Moreover, negative environmental externalities from the North to the South may foster growth in the South, which may have in turn feedback effects on growth in the North. Finally, we discuss possible welfare effects of transferring the environmental impact of Northern production to the South and show that such a policy may decrease welfare in both hemispheres

How Low Can You Go?: Widespread Challenges in Measuring Low Stream Discharge and a Path Forward

Low flows pose unique challenges for accurately quantifying streamflow. Current field methods are not optimized to measure these conditions, which in turn, limits research and management. In this essay, we argue that the lack of methods for measuring low streamflow is a fundamental challenge that must be addressed to ensure sustainable water management now and into the future, particularly as climate change shifts more streams to increasingly frequent low flows. We demonstrate the pervasive challenge of measuring low flows, present a decision support tool (DST) for navigating best practices in measuring low flows, and highlight important method developmental needs

A Review of Agent-Based Modeling of Climate-Energy Policy

Agent-based models (ABMs) have recently seen much application to the field of climate mitigation policies. They offer a more realistic description of micro behavior than traditional climate policy models by allowing for agent heterogeneity, bounded rationality and nonmarket interactions over social networks. This enables the analysis of a broader spectrum of policies. Here, we review 61 ABM studies addressing climate-energy policy aimed at emissions reduction, product and technology diffusion, and energy conservation. This covers a broad set of instruments of climate policy, ranging from carbon taxation, and emissions trading through adoption subsidies to information provision tools such as smart meters and eco-labels. Our treatment pays specific attention to behavioral assumptions and the structure of social networks. We offer suggestions for future research with ABMs to answer neglected policy questions. This article is categorized under: Climate Economics > Economics of Mitigation. © 2020 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.This study has received funding through an ERC Advanced Grant from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme (grant agreement no. 741087). I.S. acknowledges financial support from the Russian Science Foundation [RSF grant number 19-18-00262]

The Role of Histone H4 Biotinylation in the Structure of Nucleosomes

Background: Post-translational modifications of histones play important roles in regulating nucleosome structure and gene transcription. It has been shown that biotinylation of histone H4 at lysine-12 in histone H4 (K12Bio-H4) is associated with repression of a number of genes. We hypothesized that biotinylation modifies the physical structure of nucleosomes, and that biotin-induced conformational changes contribute to gene silencing associated with histone biotinylation. Methodology/Principal Findings: To test this hypothesis we used atomic force microscopy to directly analyze structures of nucleosomes formed with biotin-modified and non-modified H4. The analysis of the AFM images revealed a 13% increase in the length of DNA wrapped around the histone core in nucleosomes with biotinylated H4. This statistically significant (p,0.001) difference between native and biotinylated nucleosomes corresponds to adding approximately 20 bp to the classical 147 bp length of nucleosomal DNA. Conclusions/Significance: The increase in nucleosomal DNA length is predicted to stabilize the association of DNA with histones and therefore to prevent nucleosomes from unwrapping. This provides a mechanistic explanation for the gene silencing associated with K12Bio-H4. The proposed single-molecule AFM approach will be instrumental for studying the effects of various epigenetic modifications of nucleosomes, in addition to biotinylation

Managing the climate commons at the nexus of ecology, behaviour and economics

Sustainably managing coupled ecological–economic systems requires not only an understanding of the environmental factors that affect them, but also knowledge of the interactions and feedback cycles that operate between resource dynamics and activities attributable to human intervention. The socioeconomic dynamics, in turn, call for an investigation of the behavioural drivers behind human action. We argue that a multidisciplinary approach is needed in order to tackle the increasingly pressing and intertwined environmental challenges faced by modern societies. Academic contributions to climate change policy have been constrained by methodological and terminological differences, so we discuss how programmes aimed at cross-disciplinary education and involvement in governance may help to unlock scholars' potential to propose new solutions

A Histone Map of Human Chromosome 20q13.12

We present a systematic search for regulatory elements in a 3.5 Mb region on human chromosome 20q13.12, a region associated with a number of medical conditions such as type II diabetes and obesity.We profiled six histone modifications alongside RNA polymerase II (PolII) and CTCF in two cell lines, HeLa S3 and NTERA-2 clone D1 (NT2/D1), by chromatin immunoprecipitation using an in-house spotted DNA array, constructed with 1.8 kb overlapping plasmid clones. In both cells, more than 90% of transcription start sites (TSSs) of expressed genes showed enrichments with PolII, di-methylated lysine 4 of histone H3 (H3K4me2), tri-methylated lysine 4 of histone H3 (H3K4me3) or acetylated H3 (H3Ac), whereas mono-methylated lysine 4 of histone H3 (H3K4me1) signals did not correlate with expression. No TSSs were enriched with tri-methylated lysine 27 of histone H3 (H3K27me3) in HeLa S3, while eight TSSs (4 expressed) showed enrichments in NT2/D1. We have also located several CTCF binding sites that are potential insulator elements.In summary, we annotated a number of putative regulatory elements in 20q13.12 and went on to verify experimentally a subset of them using dual luciferase reporter assays. Correlating this data to sequence variation can aid identification of disease causing variants