Remote sensing program

Built on Cornell's thirty years of experience in aerial photographic studies, the NASA-sponsored remote sensing program strengthened instruction and research in remote sensing, established communication links within and beyond the university community, and conducted research projects for or with town, county, state, federal, and private organizations in New York State. The 43 completed applied research projects are listed as well as 13 spinoff grants/contracts. The curriculum offered, consultations provided, and data processing facilities available are described. Publications engendered are listed including the thesis of graduates in the remote sensing program

The Growth of Obesity and Technological Change: A Theoretical and Empirical Examination

This paper provides a theoretical and empirical examination of the long-run growth in weight over time. We argue that technological change has induced weight growth by making home- and market-production more sedentary and by lowering food prices through agricultural innovation. We analyze how such technological change leads to unexpected relationships among income, food prices, and weight. Using individual-level data from 1976 to 1994, we then find that such technology-based reductions in food prices and job-related exercise have had significant impacts on weight across time and populations. In particular, we find that about forty percent of the recent growth in weight seems to be due to agricultural innovation that has lowered food prices, while sixty percent may be due to demand factors such as declining physical activity from technological changes in home and market production.

An Empirical Examination of Information Barriers to Trade in Insurance

This paper tests restrictions implied by the canonical theory of insurance under asymmetric information using ideal data that contains the self-perceived and actual mortality risk of individuals, as well as the price and quantity of their life insurance. We report several findings which are hard to reconcile with the canonical theory. First, we find a striking independence of self-perceived risk and the price of insurance. Second, we find strong evidence of the opposite type of non-linear pricing than predicted by theory: the theory predicts that prices rise with quantity, but we find that they fall. Third, we find that risk is negatively correlated with the quantity of insurance purchased although the theory predicts a positive correlation. Fourth, we find that a substantial fraction of individuals hold multiple insurance contracts, which casts doubt on the prediction that unit prices rise with quantity because multiple small contracts dominate a large one in such a case. Lastly, we test the accuracy of the self-perceived risk of the insured through estimating the induced profits they imply. We conclude by discussing the robustness of these results and the questions they raise for future theoretical models.

Intellectual Property & External Consumption Effects: Generalizations from Pharmaceutical Markets

There is a long-standing literature that recognizes that an efficient solution in correcting a consumption externality is through applying subsidies and taxes that line up private incentives with social ones. An equally long-standing literature tackles the appropriate methods of generating the efficient amount of R&D into goods that only have private consumption effects, e.g. the analysis of the welfare effects of patent regulations. This paper analyzes the joint problem of the optimal provision of R&D and consumption incentives for goods that at the same time undergo technological change and have external consumption effects. For good with external effects, just as is the case for goods with only private effects, ex-post static efficiency may have to be sacrificed for dynamic efficiency. For goods with only private consumption effects, it is well-understood that efficient competition ex-post leads to insufficient R&D incentives ex-ante, which is of course the common rationale for patents. For external effects, this analogy has the important and unrecognized implication that classic interventions to solve externality problems, such as Pigouvian taxes and subsidies, may often be inefficient under technological change. In many cases, arguing for Pigouvian solutions in presence of technological change is analogous to arguing for competitive markets for new inventions (!), as both argue for ex-post efficiency rather than dynamic efficiency. The results are discussed in the context of the pharmaceutical industry which simultaneously is one of the most R&D-intensive industries and one for which consumption of its output often seems to involve external effects, e.g. through human rights-based access issues.

Is the Food and Drug Administration Safe and Effective?

In the United States, drug safety and efficacy are primarily regulated by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the legal system, which gives manufacturers large incentives to produce safe drugs and provide proper warnings for side effects, since patients can sue manufacturers that provide unsafe drugs and/or insufficient warnings. In this paper, we begin by examining the efficiency implications of this joint regulation of drug safety. We find that joint regulation of drug safety can be inefficient when the regulatory authority mandates a binding and well enforced level of safety investment. In this case, product liability has no effect on a firm's safety investment, but affects welfare by raising a firm's costs and therefore prices. Using these results, we calibrate a model of the pharmaceutical market and find that, depending on the share of liability costs in marginal costs, a product liability exemption for activities that are well regulated by the FDA could increase consumer welfare by $47.8-$754.7 billion annually (4-66 percent of sales) and producer welfare by $11.9-$173.9 billion annually (1-15 percent of sales). In addition, we summarize the welfare effects of recent legislation, the Prescription Drug User Fee Acts (PDUFA), which mandated faster FDA review times in exchange for user fees levied on the pharmaceutical industry. Overall, we find that the faster review times mandated by PDUFA raised social surplus by $18-31 billion, and that at most, the concomitant cost of reduced drug safety was$5.6-$16.6 billion.

Cornell University remote sensing program

There are no author-identified significant results in this report