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In 2010, while working on a PhD in South Korea, Andray Abrahamian visited the other Korea, a country he had studied for years but never seen. He returned determined to find a way to work closely with North Koreans. Ten years and more than thirty visits later, Being in North Korea tells the story of his experiences helping set up and run Choson Exchange, a non-profit that teaches North Koreans about entrepreneurship and economic policy.
Southeast Asia is arguably the most diverse region in the world. Accordingly, rather than addressing the exact same question, the contributors to this volume have — as experts on Southeast Asia-China relations — explored the matters they see as most important and most deserving of exploration and exposure. After the editor’s introduction, the chapters proceed in pairs. Each pair and a closing chapter cover a distinctive theme in Southeast Asia’s interactions with China.
Recent dramatic and deadly increases in global wildfire activity have increased attention on the causes of wildfires, their consequences, and how risk from fire might be mitigated. Here we bring together data on the changing risk and societal burden of wildfire in the US. We estimate that nearly 50 million homes are currently in the wildland-urban interface in the US, a number increasing by 1 million houses every 3 years.
Effective as of July 1, 2018, South Korea set a new cap on employees’ weekly working hours, decreasing the maximum number from 68 to 52. In this study, we comprehensively analyze the effectiveness of the law’s implementation by observing changes in work time, health status, health care utilization, health behavior, monthly expenses, and satisfaction between pre- and post-implementation periods (2014–2017 vs. 2019). We find evidence of both intended and unintended consequences—and, in this last category, some are beneficial and some not.
Estimation of pollution impacts on health is critical for guiding policy to improve health outcomes. Estimation is challenging, however, because economic activity can worsen pollution but also independently improve health outcomes, confounding pollution–health estimates. We leverage variation in exposure to local particulate matter of diameter <2.5 μm (PM2.5) across Sub-Saharan Africa driven by distant dust export from the Sahara, a source uncorrelated with local economic activity.
COVID-19 presents humanity with not just a health crisis but also a governance crisis as leaders around the globe confront the challenges of stemming the spread of the virus. Various governments have responded in various ways to slow the transmission of the virus. Ideally, the leaders of a country should approach the crisis with a two-pronged attack. The first is to flatten the epidemic curve (epi curve), which is simply a graphical representation of the number of cases and date of onset of the illness, and the second is to raise or strengthen the capacity of the health system.
American democracy is in trouble. Since the 2016 election, a sizable literature has developed that focuses on diagnosing and assessing the state of American democracy, most of which concludes that our system of government is in decline.[2] These authors point to the rise in party polarization, the increasingly bipartisan abandonment of the norms of the democratic process, the rise of populism, the degradation of the public sphere, and the proliferation of gerrymandered districts and voting restrictions to illustrate the breakdown.
We show that the negative demand shock due to the COVID-19 lock-down has reduced net-demand system demand less the amount of energy produced by intermittent renewables and net imports that must be served by controllable generation units. Introducing additional intermittent renewable generation capacity will also reduce the net-demand, which implies the lock-down can provide insights about how electricity markets will perform with a large share of renewable generation capacity.
We report on an economic experiment that compares outcomes in electricity markets subject to carbon-tax and cap-and-trade policies. Under conditions of uncertainty, price-based and quantity-based policy instruments cannot be truly equivalent, so we compared three matched carbon-tax/cap-and-trade pairs with equivalent emissions targets, mean emissions, and mean carbon prices, respectively.
Where does the state come from? Two canonical answers have been interstate wars and contracts between rulers and the ruled in the early modern period. New scholarship has pushed back the historical origins of the European state to the Middle Ages, and focused on domestic institutions such as parliaments, universities, the law, inheritance rules, and cities. It has left open questions of the causes of territorial fragmentation, the structural similarities in state administrations, and the policy preoccupations of the state.
The intention to pay for human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccination among women of childbearing age in Vietnam, where cervical cancer remains a significant public health concern, has been mostly lacking. To examine this issue, we conducted a cross-sectional study of 807 pregnant women in an urban and a rural district (Dong Da and Ba Vi) of Hanoi, Vietnam. The vast percentage of our respondents expressed a firm intention to vaccinate, especially women in rural areas (over 90.0%).
Californians like to think of themselves as environmentally conscious and forward-thinking. The state’s energy and environmental policies reflect these sentiments. With the passage of SB 100, California has one of the nation’s most ambitious renewable energy goals for its electricity supply industry. The California Solar Initiative rebate program has led to more rooftop solar capacity in the state than the total rooftop solar capacity installed in the next eight highest-capacity states.
This paper uses a Lagrangian approach to provide sufficient conditions under which money burning expenditures are used in an optimal delegation contract. For comparison, we also establish simple sufficient conditions for the optimality of a cap allocation under a restricted set of preferences for a benchmark setting in which money burning is not allowed. We also apply our findings to a model of cooperation and to a model with quadratic preferences and families of distribution functions. In addition, we provide several comparative statics results.
A weasel word is a term used in academic or political discourse whose meaning is so imprecise or badly defined that it impedes the formulation of coherent thought on the subject to which it is applied, or leads to unsubstantiated conclusions. In this symposium we consider several key terms central to the study of postcommunist politics and discuss the extent to which they fall into this category. The terms discussed here include regime terminology, the notion of postcommunism, the geographic entity “Eurasia,” socialism, populism, and neoliberalism.
Explore our series of multimedia interviews and Q&As with the contributors to this volume:
Small businesses are typically committed to providing a positive customer experience and therefore may exhibit a response to dynamic electricity prices different from residential or industrial customers. We conduct a field experiment to determine the extent to which small businesses respond through re-configuration of typical routines throughout the experiment period versus through adjustments to specific dynamic pricing events.
An increasing number of wholesale electricity markets employ locational pricing mechanisms where energy prices account for some or all aspects of the transmission network configuration. A major concern of regulators is that suppliers may have the ability to exercise unilateral market power by impacting the extent to which transmission constraints bind. We extend the residual demand curve as a measure of the ability to exercise unilateral market power from a single price market to residual demand hypersurfaces in locational pricing markets.
By: Gregory Falco, Stanford University
Martin Eling, University of St. Gallen
Danielle Jablanski, Stanford University
Virginia Miller, Stanford University
Lawrence A. Gordon, University of Maryland
Shaun Shuxun Wang, Nanyang Technological University
Joan Schmit, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Russell Thomas, RMS and George Mason University
We extend the competitive benchmark pricing model of Borenstein et al. (2002) to locational-pricing markets. We further extent this model to account for transmission network security constraints as well as technical constraints on thermal power plants that introduce non-convexities in their operating cost functions. We apply both models to assess the performance of the Italian wholesale electricity market for the year 2018.