Fundamental Flaws of Social Regulation: The Case of Airplane Noise

The growing concern about the cost-effectiveness of social regulations has spurred Senators Fred Thompson and Carl Levin to introduce legislation requiring federal regulatory agencies to conduct a cost-benefit analysis of every regulation with an annual economic impact greater than $100 million. But while this legislation appears to be a step in the right direction, it fails to address an issue that is even more important than the balancing of regulatory costs and benefits. The fundamental economic criteria for evaluating any public policy is whether it maximizes social net benefits. Given that social regulations are, in principle, designed to reduce welfare losses caused by externalities or threats to human health and safety, the first step for regulators is to know whether the (alleged) market failure is sufficiently costly to justify government intervention and whether a proposed regulation is the most efficient way to correct the market failure. The paper studies the regulatory battle over airplane noise to illustrate how addressing these questions can improve regulatory policy by targeting government action where it is needed. The 1990 Airport Noise and Capacity Act (ANCA) mandated the elimination of certain (Stage II) aircraft at all U.S. airports by the end of 1999. The ANCA therefore affected aircraft design and generated benefits to homeowners who live in areas affected by airplane noise, but it has also generated costs to airlines by reducing the economic life of their capital stock. Surprisingly, analysts have not addressed the basic question of whether the benefits of the ANCA, arguably the most important piece of airplane noise regulation to date, exceed its costs. Our own cost-benefit analysis of the ANCA finds that its$5 billion (present discounted value) in benefits fall considerably short of its $10 billion costs. More fundamentally, we find that the net benefits that could have been generated even by an economically optimal airplane noise tax amount to only$0.2 billion (present value). Just as the ANCA has done, an optimal noise policy would transfer wealth from airlines and travelers to homeownersCalthough to a much smaller extent. It appears that current FAA noise regulations have generated substantial costs to society when, in fact, there was little justification on efficiency grounds for any regulatory intervention in the first place. A solid analytical foundation for social regulation will preclude criticism of its cost-effectiveness.

Beaming effect from increased-index photonic crystal waveguides

We study the beaming effect of light for the case of increased-index photonic crystal (PhC) waveguides, formed through the omission of low-dielectric media in the waveguide region. We employ the finite-difference time-domain numerical method for characterizing the beaming effect and determining the mechanisms of loss and the overall efficiency of the directional emission. We find that, while this type of PhC waveguides is capable of producing a highly collimated emission as was demonstrated experimentally, the inherent characteristics of the structure result in a restrictively low efficiency in the coupling of light into the collimated beam of light.Comment: 4 pages, 5 figures, submitted to Applied Physics

International Effects of the Andersen Accounting and Auditing Scandals: Some Evidence from the US, UK and Australian Stock Markets

In this paper, we use event study methodology to examine the effect of two highly publicized accounting failures, at Enron and WorldCom both audited by Arthur Andersen, on the total stock returns of some companies in the UK also audited by Arthur Andersen. The results vary substantially between countries. We find no evidence of a significant impact in the UK or US. There is some evidence of negative abnormal returns at the time of the Enron scandal in Australia. However, this reaction was very short-lived and the negative abnormal returns on the stocks of Andersen-audited companies had been fully recovered within a week. Our results suggest that sharing an auditor with a firm that has issued corrections to accounts which have previously received an unqualified audit opinion does not significantly affect market perceptions of firms’ value, which suggests that the choice of auditor has little, if any, impact on market perceptions of the reliability of published financial information. Key words: Accounting scandals, Enron, WorldCom, Event study, International Stock Markets.

Falling Down: Assessing the Risk of Falls in Older Adults

Educational Objectives 1. To provide an overview of the problems associated with falling in older adults. 2. To outline the strengths and weaknesses of the various screening tools used for effective evaluation of an individual’s fall risk. 3. To highlight the benefits of assessing physiological function when screening for falls risk

Membership Crime vs. The Right to Assemble, 48 J. Marshall L. Rev. 729 (2015)

The World War I (WWI) era generated the substantive First Amendment. Subsequent jurisprudence, however, has focused on the speech right and left the right to assemble underdeveloped. This is so because courts, lawyers, and scholars view the WWI cases as speech cases. In fact, these cases implicitly tested the assembly right more than they have been read to test the speech right because they involved “membership crime” – criminal conspiracy in federal and state courts, and criminal syndicalism at the state level. This Article uncovers the importance of the assembly right during the substantive First Amendment’s generation. It therefore serves as a corrective to the law’s lopsided focus on the speech right, and ultimately argues for the importance of assembly in democracy-based arguments for robust First Amendment rights

Assessment of geo-environmental inequalities in the Glasgow conurbation

Links between environmental quality and health have been of increased interest in recent years, with studies investigating the effects of air pollution, river-water quality and contaminated land. The current project investigated the spatial associations between potentially harmful metals in the soil; air pollution indicators and health indicators, in the context of Environmental Justice across Glasgow. The relationships between indicators of deprivation and the other variables were also assessed. The key aims of this research were to assess the spatial distributions of the environmental and health variables across Greater Glasgow and to carry out an overview investigation of the spatial associations between the variables on a city-wide basis. Chapter 1 is a literature review of environmental and health issues including a discussion of Environmental Justice in Scotland, the effects of air pollution on health, contaminated land legislation and the potential health effects of soil contaminants. Chapter 2 is an introduction to the datasets used in the study, presentation methods and geostatistical analysis methodology, including variograms and kriging. The modelling and inference methods used are also discussed. Chapter 3 presents a preliminary analysis of the soil metals dataset along with an exploratory analysis of each of the soil contaminants. This analysis focuses on the geologically and anthropogenically controlled distributions of each element, identifying and removing any trends which may be present and generating concentration predictions where necessary. Chapter 4 includes the spatial presentation of each of the datasets, where each is presented at the Intermediate Geography (IG) level. In this chapter, the geometric mean of each soil contaminant is illustrated across Greater Glasgow along with an index of soil metal scores based on distribution percentiles. Chapter 5 contains the results of the analysis whereby the relationships between the environmental and health indicators are assessed. This includes an exploratory analysis of the spatial associations between the variables before the relationships are then formally assessed with use of generalised linear models and relative risks. This Chapter also discusses issues regarding modelling health outcomes, modelling the soil contaminants and the ecological fallacy. Chapter 6 summarises the findings of the research, some constraints to the analysis and recommendations for future work on environmental and health studies

An elliptic curve test of the L-Functions Ratios Conjecture

We compare the L-Function Ratios Conjecture's prediction with number theory for the family of quadratic twists of a fixed elliptic curve with prime conductor, and show agreement in the 1-level density up to an error term of size X^{-(1-sigma)/2} for test functions supported in (-sigma, sigma); this gives us a power-savings for \sigma<1. This test of the Ratios Conjecture introduces complications not seen in previous cases (due to the level of the elliptic curve). Further, the results here are one of the key ingredients in the companion paper [DHKMS2], where they are used to determine the effective matrix size for modeling zeros near the central point for this family. The resulting model beautifully describes the behavior of these low lying zeros for finite conductors, explaining the data observed by Miller in [Mil3]. A key ingredient in our analysis is a generalization of Jutila's bound for sums of quadratic characters with the additional restriction that the fundamental discriminant be congruent to a non-zero square modulo a square-free integer M. This bound is needed for two purposes. The first is to analyze the terms in the explicit formula corresponding to characters raised to an odd power. The second is to determine the main term in the 1-level density of quadratic twists of a fixed form on GL_n. Such an analysis was performed by Rubinstein [Rub], who implicitly assumed that Jutila's bound held with the additional restriction on the fundamental discriminants; in this paper we show that assumption is justified.Comment: 35 pages, version 1.2. To appear in the Journal of Number Theor

Feeding Techniques To Increase Calf Growth In The First Two Months Of Life

End of project reportData from Cornell University and the University of Illinois in the USA suggested that average daily liveweight gains of 900 to 1000 g/calf/day could be achieved from birth to weaning provided the calf milk replacer (CMR) is formulated to meet the calf’s amino acid requirements for such a rate of gain. Their findings suggested a daily milk replacer DM allowance of 1250 to 1500 g/d with a crude protein content of 26 to 30%. A series of studies were undertaken, at ARINI with home born dairy calves and at Grange Beef Research Centre with purchased dairy calves, to determine the effect of increasing the daily milk replacer DM allowance and or increasing the crude protein content of the CMR on calf performance.The main outcomes of these studies were There was no growth or intake response in any of the studies to increasing the crude protein content of the CMP from 23% to 28%. Calf growth rates responded to increasing the dailymilk replacer allowance from 600 to 1200 g/day for both home bred and purchased calves. However, the effect was not significant post-weaning in any of the studies. In all of the studies (for both home reared and purchased calves) feeding a high level of CMRdecreased concentrate DM intake. However, the calves concentrate intakes were similar post-weaning. The home bred calves with free access to the milk replacer feeders failed to consume their 1200 g/day allowance. Calves offered 600 or 1200 g of CMR/day had average consumption of 554 and 944 g/d, respectively, in the milk feeding period. Feeding a high (1200 g/d) compared to a low level (600 g/d) CMRdiet for the first 56 days had no significant effect on carcass weight or carcass characteristics when purchased male calves were slaughtered off an ad libitum concentrate diet after 388 days. The final carcass weights were 231 and 240 kg for the respective 600 and 1200 g/d CMR. Reducing the fat content of the CMRfrom 18% to 12% did not have any effect on concentrate intake or liveweight gain