Protecting the Homeland by Exemption: Why the Critical Infrastructure Information Act of 2002 Will Degrade the Freedom of Information Act

To protect against cyberterror, the House version of the Homeland Security Act exempts information related to the nation\u27s critical infrastructure from the Freedom of Information Act disclosure requirements. The proposed exemption unnecessarily threatens public access to vital information about health and safety information; information the Freedom of Information Act was designed to guarantee

Is I-Voting I-Llegal?

The Voting Rights Act was passed to prevent racial discrimination in all voting booths. Does the existence of a racial digital divide make Internet elections for public office merely a computer geek\u27s pipe dream? Or can i-voting withstand scrutiny under the current state of the law? This i-Brief will consider the current state of the law, and whether disproportionate benefits will be enough to stop this extension of technology dead in its tracks

Predicting Effort and Protected Species Bycatch Under an Effort Limit or Take Caps

Many production processes feature joint production of a desirable output with an undesirable byproduct. Producers and consumers of the desirable output mutually benefit at the expense of non-consumers, who bear external damage costs imposed by production of the undesirable byproduct. A standard approach to regulating such production activities is through the combination of a limit on allowable production effort in conjunction with a cap on the level of the undesirable output. The situation is greatly complicated when the production externality is a random function which depends on the level of production effort. In this case, capping undesirable output induces a random limit on the level of the production effort, assuming further production is prohibited once the undesirable output cap is reached. One situation which fits the above description is that of controlling protected species bycatch in commercial fisheries management. Because protected species are typically rare or endangered, and hence limited in population size and distribution, protected species bycatch is by nature a rare event, subject to random variation over time periods or areas where fishing effort occurs. A standard approach to protected species bycatch mitigation is to employ some combination of effort limit and protected species take caps within a given fishing season, in order to ensure that fishing effort ends before an unacceptably large number of protected species takes has occurred. Given the inherent randomness of protected species bycatch for a given level of fishing effort, a number of questions of interest arise in comparing alternative bycatch management regimes, including: 1. If effort reaches the regulatory limit, what is the likely range of variation in bycatch? 2. What is the likely range of effort under regulation by protected species take caps? 3. What is the effect on the allowable range of effort if take caps are simultaneously implemented for multiple protected species? 4. With multiple take caps and an overall effort limit, what are the probabilities for hitting each of the different possible caps or limit? A probabilistic framework is developed herein to address these and related questions. I use a Poisson distribution to model the probability distribution of bycatch conditional on a given level of effort. A Bayesian framework for deriving predictive distributions of bycatch conditional on fishing effort is used to obtain the stochastic effort limit for a given specified limit and take caps. The methodology is applied to observer data from the Hawaii-based longline fishery for swordfish in order to address the questions posed above.Resource /Energy Economics and Policy,

A Semiparametric Test for Heterogeneous Risk

Risk and Uncertainty,

A Market-Based Approach to Manage Endangered Species Interactions

An economic activity interacts with an endangered species. The activity can be divided into mutually exclusive strata with different levels of interaction. Observing the activity in order to monitor interactions is costly. It may be desirable to manage the activity with a probability model which balances the benefit from the activity against the cost of the interaction with the endangered specie instead. The model gives rise to a permit scheme which fixates the risk of interaction over all strata and which uses the market mechanism to optimally allocate the activity between strata. The model can facilitate uncertainty in interaction rate estimates.Endangered species interactions; permit scheme; probability model

Tax Policies and Residential Mobility

Governmental tax policies have direct consequences for public spending and the distribution of wealth among a country’s population. But unintended consequences may also occur as a result of the design of those policies. We illustrate the potential impact of such unintended consequences by analyzing differences in home ownership mobility in California, Illinois, and Massachusetts that appear to result from the distinct differences in the design of real estate tax polices across these states. California’s Proposition 13, which became law in 1978, limits the increase in real estate taxes to a maximum of 2% in any given year regardless of home value appreciation. With home value appreciation, Proposition 13 creates sizeable disincentives to move. The evidence from an analysis of single family home sales records in California, Illinois, and Massachusetts indicates that California’s homeowners are significantly less mobile than their counterparts in Illinois and Massachusetts. The lower mobility was clearly not intended by the passage of Proposition 13, though its impact on society is potentially very significant. We recommend that countries in the process of developing tax systems for residential real estate ownership (such as China, the countries of the former USSR, and many countries in Africa) take account of such originally unintended consequences.California, Real Estate Tax, Residential Mobility, Unintended effect

Are Real Estate IPOs a Different Species? Evidence from Hong Kong IPOs

It is well documented that in the United States, real estate investment trust (REIT) initial public offerings (IPOs) have an abnormally low initial-day return when compared to that of industrial firm IPOs. Researchers suspect that the abnormal return pattern of REIT IPOs is caused by their unique real estate holdings. Examination of 399 IPOs issued in Hong Kong during the 1986-1997 period reveals strong evidence that suggests that underlying real estate holdings cannot be the sole reason for the observed low initial-day return of REIT IPOs. This investigation indicates that there is a need to re-think the current explanations for the abnormal performance of REIT IPOs.

Jakob Matthias Buehler: Conservative Missionary and Theologian

The purpose of the paper is not so much to sketch a history, as to see whether the difficulties Rev. Buehler encountered were a result of his liberalism or conservatism

A Poisson Probability Model of Protected Species Take Risk

Resource /Energy Economics and Policy,