MODELING THE DECISION TO BUY FLOOD INSURANCE: AN EMPIRICAL ANALYSIS FOR COASTAL AREAS

A perennial question about the NFIP is: how can participation be increased? An empirical analysis reveals that in coastal areas the voluntary participation rate is only nine percent and identifies important determinants of the insurance purchase decision. It suggests that insurance will not discourage undesirable risk management practices in coastal areas.Risk and Uncertainty,

THE TRADEOFFS IN ECOSYSTEM MANAGEMENT: THE CASE OF LOGGING AND RECREATION IN THE SOUTHERN APPALACHIANS

The US Forest Service is adopting ecosystem management, but the potential impact on local economies is unknown. Analysis via a recursive system of regression equations reveals that some ecosystem management variables have an influence upon recreational visitation which, in turn, has a net negative impact on county employment levels.Environmental Economics and Policy, Resource /Energy Economics and Policy,

SCHOOL CHOICE IN RURAL GEORGIA: AN EMPIRICAL ANALYSIS

Previous empirical studies of school choice have been at the national level, or have focussed on northeastern states. We estimate the demand for private education in rural Georgia, using proportion of private school attendance as an indicator variable. We find that income, tuition, race and school quality are important choice determinants. The results provide useful information for rural school administrators, and suggest that a tuition tax credit would have to be substantial to cause a significant exodus from public schools.School choice, Educational finance, Rural areas, Tuition tax credits, Public Economics,

VALUING RISK-REDUCING INTERVENTIONS WITH HEDONIC MODELS: THE CASE OF EROSION PROTECTION

This article extends the literature on economic valuation of public interventions that reduce environmental risk. We consider the case where risk-reducing interventions have different characteristics than the risk proxies used in hedonic regressions. We then demonstrate the importance of these considerations by reexamining an existing analysis of shoreline protection where we estimate risk using a latent variables model. The results show substantially different and arguably more plausible results.Environmental Economics and Policy, Risk and Uncertainty,

EXPANDING THE NATIONAL FLOOD INSURANCE PROGRAM TO COVER COASTAL EROSION DAMAGE

The National Flood Insurance Program does not currently cover damage strictly attributable to coastal erosion. This paper uses the results of a nationwide survey of coastal property owners to estimate the demand for such insurance. We find that there is significant demand at prices in the range of current flood insurance premiums. Demand is influenced in the hypothesized way by increased measures of erosion risk as well as by insurance price and income.Land Economics/Use, Risk and Uncertainty,

COSTS OF COASTAL HAZARDS: EVIDENCE FROM THE PROPERTY MARKET

A hedonic price model suggests that flooding and erosion hazards, and the actions taken against them, are major determinants of property values in American coastal areas. A zoning ordnance against new construction within the 60-year erosion hazard area would increase property values and perhaps conserve the coastal ecosystem.Environmental Economics and Policy, Land Economics/Use,

AN ECONOMIC EVALUATION OF BEACH EROSION MANAGEMENT ALTERNATIVES

This paper examines the relative economic efficiency of three distinct beach erosion management policies — beach nourishment with shoreline armoring, beach nourishment without armoring, and shoreline retreat. The analysis focuses on (i) the recreational benefits of beaches, (ii) the property value effects of beach management, and (iii) the costs associated with the three management scenarios. Assuming the removal of shoreline armoring improves overall beach quality, beach nourishment with shoreline armoring is the least desirable of the three alternatives. The countervailing property losses under a retreat strategy are of the same order of magnitude as the foregone management costs when the beneficial effects of retreat — higher values of housing services for those houses not lost to erosion — are considered. The relative desirability of these alternative strategies depends upon the realized erosion rate and how management costs change over time.Resource /Energy Economics and Policy,

Community Impacts from a Temporary Military Deployment: The Case of Fort Stewart, Ga.

The rural South has long been a popular location for the installment of military bases. Small Southern communities around these installations have experienced many social and economic changes due to operational changes in the base. Even the slightest alterations have a ripple effect on residents who rely on the base for local economic stability. Although many studies have examined the impacts associated with military base closures, this paper addresses a related but not identical problem. Using a combined rural sociological and agricultural and applied economic perspective, an analysis is made which examines the local social and economic disruption caused by temporary troop deployments from a military base which is the major employer in the rural Southern community. From this multi-disciplinary standpoint, impacts on a Southern rural community are analyzed both in terms of economic dependence of the local civilian population and the social consequences of the troops absence from the community during a deployment

Neutron Capture on the s-Process Branching Point 171^{171}Tm via Time-of-Flight and Activation

The neutron capture cross sections of several unstable nuclides acting as branching points in the s process are crucial for stellar nucleosynthesis studies. The unstable $^{171}$Tm(t$_{1/2}$=1.92 yr) is part of the branching around mass A∼170 but its neutron capture cross section as a function of the neutron energy is not known to date. In this work, following the production for the first time of more than 5 mg of $^{171}$Tm at the high-flux reactor Institut Laue-Langevin in France, a sample was produced at the Paul Scherrer Institute in Switzerland. Two complementary experiments were carried out at the neutron time-of-flight facility (n_TOF) at CERN in Switzerland and at the SARAF liquid lithium target facility at Soreq Nuclear Research Center in Israel by time of flight and activation, respectively. The result of the time-of-flight experiment consists of the first ever set of resonance parameters and the corresponding average resonance parameters, allowing us to make an estimation of the Maxwellian-averaged cross sections (MACS) by extrapolation. The activation measurement provides a direct and more precise measurement of the MACS at 30 keV: 384(40) mb, with which the estimation from the n_TOF data agree at the limit of 1 standard deviation. This value is 2.6 times lower than the JEFF-3.3 and ENDF/B-VIII evaluations, 25% lower than that of the Bao et al. compilation, and 1.6 times larger than the value recommended in the KADoNiS (v1) database, based on the only previous experiment. Our result affects the nucleosynthesis at the A∼170 branching, namely, the $^{171}$Yb abundance increases in the material lost by asymptotic giant branch stars, providing a better match to the available pre-solar SiC grain measurements compared to the calculations based on the current JEFF-3.3 model-based evaluation