Jay S. Coggins

Health benefits of air pollution abatement policy: Role of the shape of the concentration–response function

There is strong evidence that fine particulate matter (aerodynamic diameter <2.5 μm; PM2.5) air pollution contributes to increased risk of disease and death. Estimates of the burden of disease attributable to PM2.5 pollution and benefits of reducing pollution are dependent upon the shape of the concentration response (C-R) functions. Recent evidence suggests that the C-R function between PM2.5 air pollution and mortality risk may be supralinear across wide ranges of exposure. Such results imply that incremental pollution abatement efforts may yield greater benefits in relatively clean areas than in highly polluted areas. The role of the shape of the C-R function in evaluating and understanding the costs and health benefits of air pollution abatement policy is explored. There remain uncertainties regarding the shape of the C-R function, and additional efforts to more fully understand the C-R relationships between PM2.5 and adverse health effects are needed to allow for more informed and effective air pollution abatement policies. Current evidence, however, suggests that there are benefits both from reducing air pollution in the more polluted areas and from continuing to reduce air pollution in cleaner areas. Implications: Estimates of the benefits of reducing PM2.5 air pollution are highly dependent upon the shape of the PM2.5-mortality concentration-response (C-R) function. Recent evidence indicates that this C-R function may be supralinear across wide ranges of exposure, suggesting that incremental pollution abatement efforts may yield greater benefits in relatively clean areas than in highly polluted areas. This paper explores the role of the shape of the C-R function in evaluating and understanding the costs and health benefits of PM2.5 air pollution abatement.

Tradable Permits For Controlling Nitrates In Groundwater At The Farm Level: A Conceptual Model

Nitrate contamination of municipal and domestic well water supplies is becoming an increasing problem in many rural and urban areas, raising the cost of providing safe drinking water. The objective of this paper is to describe a marketable permit scheme that can effectively manage nitrate pollution of groundwater supplies for communities in rural areas without hindering agricultural production in watersheds. The key to implementing this scheme is being able to link nitrate leaching from nitrogen fertilizer applied to crops at a farm to nitrate levels measured at a drinking water well.

A Spatial Model of Air Pollution: The Impact of the Concentration-Response Function

We develop a spatial model to examine policies aimed at reducing ambient concentrations of fine particulates (PM2.5), with emissions from many sources that affect many population centers. Two alternative specifications of the relationship between PM2.5 concentration and health impacts from Krewski et al. are analyzed: log-linear, which implies downward-sloping marginal benefits of abatement; and log-log, which implies upward-sloping marginal benefits of abatement. A standard assumption would be that the greatest benefit from cleanup would occur in the dirtiest locations. We show, however, that for the log-log (but not log-linear) relationship, the largest risk reductions are achieved from abatement of pollution in the cleanest locations. Our model demonstrates that with a log-log relationship society should prefer lower emissions and lower pollution concentrations than if the relationship is log-linear. Our model also shows that an efficient abatement policy may substantially outperform a uniform pollution standard such as the National Ambient Air Quality Standards (NAAQS).

On fairness and welfare analysis under uncertainty

Abstract. This paper investigates the role of fairness, uncertainty, and a “veil of ignorance” in efficient resource allocation. It focuses on the choice of private and public goods, the method of financing, as well as the choice of information available for public decision-making. A fair-equivalent and Pareto efficient allocation is presented using a maximin criterion defined in terms of individual willingness-to-pay. The paper investigates the role of information in public decision making in terms of its implications for both efficiency and fairness. While better information typically generates improved efficiency, it can also contribute to unfair allocations. The effects of asymmetric information are discussed.

64% Majority rule in Ducal Venice: Voting for the Doge

A recent result of Caplin and Nalebuff (1988) demonstrates that, under certain conditions on individual preferences and their distribution across society, super-majority rule performs well as a social decision rule. If the required super-majority is chosen appropriately, the rule yields a unique winner and voter cycles cannot occur. The voting procedure for electing a Doge in medieval Venice, developed in 1268, employed a super-majority requirement agreeing with the Caplin and Nalebuff formula. We present a brief history of the Venetian political institutions, show how the rule was employed, and argue that it contributed to the remarkable centuries-long political stability of Venice.

Water‐quality trading: Can we get the prices of pollution right?

Water-quality trading requires inducing permit prices that account properly for spatially explicit damage relationships. We compare recent work by Hung and Shaw (2005) and Farrow et al. (2005) for river systems exhibiting branching and nonlinear damages. The Hung-Shaw scheme is robust to nonlinear damages, but not to hot spots occurring at the confluence of two branches. The Farrow et al. (2005) scheme is robust to branching, but not to nonlinear damages. We also compare the two schemes to each other. Neither dominates from a welfare perspective, but the comparison appears to tilt in favor of the Farrow et al. scheme.

COMPONENT VALUES FOR MILK USED IN CHEDDAR CHEESE

Interest in valuing the solids components of milk has continued to rise in recent years. A component valuation scheme for milk is devised to be used in cheddar cheese manufacture. Using daily plant-level data, and employing a flexible functional form, a plant-specific cheese yield function is estimated. This yield relationship serves as the basis for a valuation scheme that divides the value of all end products among three solids components of milk. These values are compared to a pricing scheme that recently appeared in the Great Basin Federal Milk Order. The plan presented here places a higher value upon milk of high fat test than does the order plan.

Global estimates of mortality associated with long-term exposure to outdoor fine particulate matter

Significance Exposure to outdoor concentrations of fine particulate matter is considered a leading global health concern, largely based on estimates of excess deaths using information integrating exposure and risk from several particle sources (outdoor and indoor air pollution and passive/active smoking). Such integration requires strong assumptions about equal toxicity per total inhaled dose. We relax these assumptions to build risk models examining exposure and risk information restricted to cohort studies of outdoor air pollution, now covering much of the global concentration range. Our estimates are severalfold larger than previous calculations, suggesting that outdoor particulate air pollution is an even more important population health risk factor than previously thought. Exposure to ambient fine particulate matter (PM2.5) is a major global health concern. Quantitative estimates of attributable mortality are based on disease-specific hazard ratio models that incorporate risk information from multiple PM2.5 sources (outdoor and indoor air pollution from use of solid fuels and secondhand and active smoking), requiring assumptions about equivalent exposure and toxicity. We relax these contentious assumptions by constructing a PM2.5-mortality hazard ratio function based only on cohort studies of outdoor air pollution that covers the global exposure range. We modeled the shape of the association between PM2.5 and nonaccidental mortality using data from 41 cohorts from 16 countries—the Global Exposure Mortality Model (GEMM). We then constructed GEMMs for five specific causes of death examined by the global burden of disease (GBD). The GEMM predicts 8.9 million [95% confidence interval (CI): 7.5–10.3] deaths in 2015, a figure 30% larger than that predicted by the sum of deaths among the five specific causes (6.9; 95% CI: 4.9–8.5) and 120% larger than the risk function used in the GBD (4.0; 95% CI: 3.3–4.8). Differences between the GEMM and GBD risk functions are larger for a 20% reduction in concentrations, with the GEMM predicting 220% higher excess deaths. These results suggest that PM2.5 exposure may be related to additional causes of death than the five considered by the GBD and that incorporation of risk information from other, nonoutdoor, particle sources leads to underestimation of disease burden, especially at higher concentrations.

Rationalizing the International Coffee Agreement virtually

From 1963 to 1989, the International Coffee Agreement controlled world trade in coffee. Like an export cartel, the organization included coffee exporters and importers as members. This paper seeks to understand the behavior of the ICA by treating it as an optimizing entity, which from social choice theory we know to be inherently troublesome. A social choice rule is specified for the ICA that is virtually implementable in Nash equilibrium. The empirical results provide arationalizing argument for the ICA, in the sense that if it sought to maximize the specified criterion function, we would expect it to behave precisely as it did behave.

Evaluating the Behavior of International Cartel Members

Some phenomena of interest in international trade can be understood by looking at only one country, pushing others into the background. Sometimes, though, to preserve the essence of a problem one must attempt to take explicit account of the interaction of nations. This viewpoint invites one to treat a collective body-in this case a group of countries-as a deciding unit. There is no shortage of applications that call for such thinking. Among them are the GATT negotiations and NAFTA, international commodity agreements, and international cartels. In each of these, the idea of treating the collective as an organic decision-maker is alluring, and to be sure much has been gained in this fashion. There are also dangers that attend adopting such a modeling strategy. Our purpose is to lay out these dangers-their source and effects-and then to introduce briefly some remedies that have become available lately. Does a group optimize? The essence of the methodology of economics inheres in the treatment of decision-makers as optimizers, attributing to them an objective criterion and the impulse to behave optimally. Can this methodology be used in studying group decision making? Arrow showed that in a certain formal sense it can-