Strategic Human Capital Management: NRC Could Better Manage the Size and Composition of Its Workforce by Further Incorporating Leading Practices

[Excerpt] After the passage of the Energy Policy Act of 2005, which included tax incentives for nuclear energy, NRC significantly expanded its workforce to meet the demands of an anticipated increase in workload that ultimately did not occur. More recently, a forecast for reduced growth in the nuclear industry prompted NRC to develop plans for changing its structure and workforce to better respond to changes in the nuclear industry. Strategic human capital planning is one of several actions the agency is taking. The explanatory statement accompanying the Consolidated Appropriations Act for fiscal year 2016 included a provision for GAO to report on NRC’s workforce management. GAO examined NRC’s strategic human capital management efforts and the extent to which these efforts incorporate leading practices. GAO reviewed NRC’s strategic workforce plan and other related documents and interviewed knowledgeable NRC officials

Addressing Soil Degradation in EU Agriculture: Relevant Processes, Practices and Policies - Report on the project 'Sustainable Agriculture and Soil Conservation (SoCo)'

Agriculture occupies a substantial proportion of the European land, and consequently plays an important role in maintaining natural resources and cultural landscapes, a precondition for other human activities in rural areas. Unsustainable farming practices and land use, including mismanaged intensification as well as land abandonment, have an adverse impact on natural resources. Having recognised the environmental challenges of agricultural land use, the European Parliament requested the European Commission in 2007 to carry out a pilot project on "Sustainable Agriculture and Soil Conservation through simplified cultivation techniques" (SoCo). The project originated from a close cooperation between the Directorate-General for Agriculture and Rural Development (DG AGRI) and the Joint Research Centre (JRC). It was implemented by the Institute for Prospective Technological Studies (IPTS) and the Institute for Environment and Sustainability (IES). This report presents the findings of a stock-taking of the current situation with respect to soil degradation processes, soil-friendly farming practices and relevant policy measures within an EU-wide perspective. This overview includes the results of the survey on the national/regional implementation of EU policies and national policies, a classification of the described soil degradation processes, soil conservation practices and policy measures, and finally the outcome of the Stakeholder Workshop which took place on 22 May 2008 in Brussels.JRC.J.5-Agriculture and Life Sciences in the Econom

Biofuels policy and the US market for motor fuels: Empirical analysis of ethanol splashing

Low ethanol prices relative to the price of gasoline blendstock, and tax credits, have resulted in discretionary blending at wholesale terminals of ethanol into fuel supplies above required levels--a practice known as ethanol splashing in industry parlance. No one knows precisely where or in what volume ethanol is being blended with gasoline and this has important implications for motor fuels markets: Because refiners cannot perfectly predict where ethanol will be blended with finished gasoline by wholesalers, they cannot know when to produce and where to ship a blendstock that when mixed with ethanol at 10% would create the most economically efficient finished motor gasoline that meets engine standards and has comparable evaporative emissions as conventional gasoline without ethanol blending. In contrast to previous empirical analyses of biofuels that have relied on highly aggregated data, our analysis is disaggregated to the level of individual wholesale fuel terminals or racks (of which there are about 350 in the US). We incorporate the price of ethanol as well as the blendstock price to model the wholesaler's decision of whether or not to blend additional ethanol into gasoline at any particular wholesale city-terminal. The empirical analysis illustrates how ethanol and gasoline prices affect ethanol usage, controlling for fuel specifications, blend attributes, and city-terminal-specific effects that, among other things, control for differential costs of delivering ethanol from bio-refinery to wholesale rack.Biofuels Ethanol splashing Wholesale fuel markets

Red bus, green bus: Market organization, driver incentives, safety, and sorting

We examine minibus competition in Hong Kong between two similar types of minibus firms: those that operate green minibuses and those that operate red minibuses. The two types of firms are distinguished by their industrial organizations and by the restrictions placed on their operations by government regulators and triad societies. Green minibuses are subject to government fare, level of service, and route regulation, and the drivers are paid a fixed monthly salary. Red minibuses are not subject to government fare, level of service, or route regulations, but they are regulated by triad societies, and their drivers are residual claimants who either own or lease their minibus. The institutional and operational characteristics are used to formulate testable implications on accident rates and journey times based on differing driver behavior under these alternative industrial organizations. The empirical results show that red minibuses have a substantially higher accident rate and lower peak-period journey times than do green minibuses, and that green minibuses have slightly lower journey times in the off-peak period. Efficient sorting may imply that passengers with high values of travel time savings and access to both types of buses may choose to ride red minibuses during peak periods and switch to green minibuses in off-peak periods

Per-unit bidding rules and buyer under-performance in natural resource sales1

In this article, we examine the role of per-unit bidding rules on firm-level contractual performance. In particular, we test the hypothesis that buyers will act on incentives to under-perform when bids are accepted in per-unit form. The empirical application uses data from per-unit auction sales of US Forest Service timber. The statistical analysis indicates that buyers systematically undercut when per-unit bids exceed the value of individual units of timber. 1 The views expressed in this article are not to be attributed to the authors’ employers.

Lifting the Alaskan Oil Export Ban: An Intervention Analysis

In this paper we examine the price effects on crude oils of removing the U.S. export ban on Alaskan North Slope crude oil in 1996. We estimate the longrun impact of removing the export ban through the use of a time series intervention analysis. The results indicate that Alaskan crude oil prices increased between $0.98 and$1.30 on the West Coast spot market relative to prices of comparable crude oils as a result of removing the export ban. However, we find no evidence that West Coast prices for refined oil products-regular unleaded gasoline, diesel fuel, and jet fuel increased as a result of lifting the ban.