BACKGROUND There is evidence that the adverse consequences of alcohol impose a substantial economic burden on societies worldwide. Given the lack of generalizability of study results across different settings, many attempts have been made to estimate the economic costs of alcohol for various settings; however, these have mostly been confined to industrialized countries. To our knowledge, there ...

High social rank is expected to incur fitness costs under unstable social conditions. A disruption of the oxidative balance may underlie such effects, but how markers of oxidative stress vary in relation to social rank and stability is unknown. We examined in mandrills whether the mating season characterized by social instability between males (but not between females) affected their oxidative ...

Because of the uncertainties and irreversibilities that are often inherent in environmental degradation, its prevention, and its economic consequences, environmental policy design can involve important problems of timing. I use a simple two-period model to illustrate these optimal timing problems and their implications for environmental policy. I then lay out and solve a continuous-time model o...

One hundred and three estimates of the marginal damage costs of carbon dioxide emissions were gathered from 28 published studies and combined to form a probability density function. The uncertainty is strongly right-skewed. If all studies are combined, the mode is $2/tC, the median $14/tC, the mean $93/tC, and the 95 percentile $350/tC. Studies with a lower discount rate have higher estimates a...

Using real options, we analyze the timing of implementing emission limits for a decaying pollutant when random environmental effects affect its stock. Two types of irreversibility are present: the first type results from long-term environmental damage, and the second from sunk costs in pollution abatement. We assume that social damage from pollution is a power function of the stock of pollutant...

conclusions accidents resulting in death, total disability, and partial disability impose a huge cost burden on society, whereas the employer will bear a relatively low cost. this is because of society’s health, treatment, and welfare systems available for treatment and rehabilitation of injured employees and their families. background occupational accidents represent one of the major problems ...

OBJECTIVE To demonstrate a cost benefit while using disposable laser fibers as compared with reusable laser fibers. Flexible ureteroscopy (FURS) is a central component of endourology. It is vital that for service provision and training purposes, costs are kept down while delivering this service. Laser fibers are known to damage scopes causing high repair and/or replacement costs. MATERIALS AN...

Though economists assume that intertemporal preferences are time-consistent, evidence suggests that a per-son's relative preference for well-being at an earlier moment over a later moment increases as the earlier moment gets closer. We explore the behavioral and welfare implications of such time-inconsistent preferences in a simple model where a person must engage in an activity exactly once du...

Plants have two principal defense mechanisms to decrease fitness losses to herbivory: tolerance, the ability to compensate fitness after damage, and resistance, the ability to avoid damage. Variation in intensity of herbivory among populations should result in variation in plant defense levels if tolerance and resistance are associated with costs. Yet little is known about how levels of toleran...

This article estimates the damage costs associated with the institutional nitrogen (N) footprint and explores how this information could be used to create more sustainable institutions. Potential damages associated with the release of nitrogen oxides (NOx), ammonia (NH3), and nitrous oxide (N2O) to air and release of nitrogen to water were estimated using existing values and a cost per unit of ...