Transboundary Spillovers and Decentralization of Environmental Policies

Most US federal environmental policies allow states to assume responsibility for implementation and enforcement of regulations; states with this responsibility are referred to as "authorized'' or having "primacy.'' Although such decentralization may have benefits, it may also have costs with pollution spillovers across states. This paper estimates these costs empirically by studying the free riding of states authorized under the Clean Water Act. The analysis examines water quality in rivers around the US and includes fixed effects for the location where water quality is monitored to address unobserved geographic heterogeneity. The estimated equations suggest that free riding gives rise to a 4% degradation of water quality downstream of authorized states, with an environmental cost downstream of $17 million annually.

International Spillovers and Water Quality in Rivers: Do Countries Free Ride?

Transboundary spillovers may degrade environmental quality if countries free ride. This paper examines the extent of such degradation in water quality in international rivers. Using data from river monitoring stations in the UN's Global Emissions Monitoring System (GEMS), it compares pollution levels in international and domestic rivers. The results suggest that free riding may substantially increase pollution in international rivers, but the estimates are sensitive to the inclusion of country effects.

The Pace of Progress at Superfund Sites: Policy Goals and Interest Group Influence

Bureaucracies may set priorities for their workload according to social goals or the desires of concentrated private interests. This paper explores bureaucratic priorities empirically by studying Superfund, the federal program for cleaning up contaminated sites. It examines the amount of time that sites on Superfund's National Priorities List require to complete three states from listing to cleanup, using an econometric method for multiple sequential durations. The empirical results provide little evidence that the EPA prioritizes sites according to their harms. By contrast, concentrated private interests, such as liable parties and local communities, play an important role in the EPA's priorities. Delays caused by liable parties may reduce net benefits of cleanup by 8%. This result suggests a benefit from funding provision of environmental quality and other public goods through diffuse sources, such as broad-based taxes, to avoid the detrimental effects of such concentrated interests.

Decentralization and Environmental Quality: An International Analysis of Water Pollution

This paper explores the empirical effects of decentralization on environmental quality by studying water pollution in rivers around the world. It examines the level of pollution and variation in pollution across jurisdictions within a country, for both a local and a regional pollutant. Federal countries exhibit greater interjurisdictional variation in pollution, supporting the traditional view that decentralization allows policies more tailored to local conditions. However, the analysis does not point to a “race to the bottom” in pollution levels.

Exponential penalty function control of loss networks

We introduce penalty-function-based admission control policies to approximately maximize the expected reward rate in a loss network. These control policies are easy to implement and perform well both in the transient period as well as in steady state. A major advantage of the penalty approach is that it avoids solving the associated dynamic program. However, a disadvantage of this approach is that it requires the capacity requested by individual requests to be sufficiently small compared to total available capacity. We first solve a related deterministic linear program (LP) and then translate an optimal solution of the LP into an admission control policy for the loss network via an exponential penalty function. We show that the penalty policy is a target-tracking policy--it performs well because the optimal solution of the LP is a good target. We demonstrate that the penalty approach can be extended to track arbitrarily defined target sets. Results from preliminary simulation studies are included.Comment: Published at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/105051604000000936 in the Annals of Applied Probability (http://www.imstat.org/aap/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org

Phase calibration generator

A phase calibration system was developed for the Deep Space Stations to generate reference microwave comb tones which are mixed in with signals received by the antenna. These reference tones are used to remove drifts of the station's receiving system from the detected data. This phase calibration system includes a cable stabilizer which transfers a 20 MHz reference signal from the control room to the antenna cone. The cable stabilizer compensates for delay changes in the long cable which connects its control room subassembly to its antenna cone subassembly in such a way that the 20 MHz is transferred to the cone with no significant degradation of the hydrogen maser atomic clock stability. The 20 MHz reference is used by the comb generator and is also available for use as a reference for receiver LO's in the cone

Radiofrequency power transfer to ion-cyclotron waves in a collision-free magnetoplasma

Radio frequency power transfer to ion cyclotron waves in collisionless plasma as function of magnetic field intensity and electron densit

Clave de Cambio

Ashlea Sigman, estudiante de la Universidad del Norte de Texas con la traducción de Verónica Velasco Alumna de la Universidad Autónoma del Estado de México narran la historia de Ramírez, un profesor de música creador de una banda de marcha de la primaria Morelos en Valle de Bravo, Estado de México. Los padres de familia se dan cuenta que es un gran logro para sus hijos el pertenecer a la banda de marcha, ya que tiene un impacto positivo el conseguir quedarse en dicho grupo.El Dr. Lenin Martell por parte de la Universidad Autónoma del Estado de México y el Dr. Thorne Anderson por la Universidad del Norte de Texas

Use of a digital tone extractor for real-time phase analysis

A digital tone extractor which monitors the phase integrity of a VLBI recording system in real time was developed. The digital tone extractor monitors phase calibrator tones injected at the antenna and tracks their phase as a function of time. It is capable of maintaining 0.001 cycle phase accuracy over the course of a VLBI experiment in accordance with the accuracy requirements of centimeter VLBI work. This real time VLBI system monitor is a safeguard against most instrumental breakdowns and operator errors