Is our nation safe from terrorist attacks? This paper examines the effectiveness of U.S. federal grants in reducing domestic vulnerability to terrorism since the 9/11 attacks. I derive a model for allocating federal funds to States based on targets within the State, the government budget, and three parameters specific to a target type the probability of attack, the expected damage upon attack, ...

This paper employs advanced time series methods to identify the dynamic properties of three hostage taking series. The immediate and long run multipliers of three covariates—successful past negotiations, violent ends, and deaths—are identified. Each hostage series responds differently to the covariates. Past concessions have the strongest impact on generating future kidnapping events, supportin...

Enhanced transcription of the Rv2660c locus in response to starvation of Mycobacterium tuberculosis H37Rv encouraged addition of the predicted Rv2660c protein to an improved vaccine formulation. Using strand-specific RNA sequencing, we show that the up-regulated transcript is in fact a small RNA encoded on the opposite strand to the annotated Rv2660c. The transcript originates within a prophage...

Today, nine OECD countries have national terrorism insurance programs based on some type of public-private risk sharing. While such arrangements helped provide the necessary insurance capacity in the post-September 11, 2001 era, little is known about the impact of such governmental intervention in terrorism insurance markets. This paper focuses on the United States, where the Terrorism Risk Ins...

Use of a promise to pay by a bank to insure an outstanding loan in order to return the value of the insured amount into capital for use in writing a new loan is an invention in banking with calculably greater potential economic impact than the original invention of reserve banking. The consequence of this lending invention is to render the existing money multiplier equations of reserve banking ...

A major problem with tuberculosis (TB) control is the long duration of drug therapy-both for latent and for active TB. Therapeutic vaccination has been postulated to improve this situation, and to this end there are several candidates already in clinical phases of development. These candidates follow two main designs, namely bacilli-directed therapy based on inactivated -whole or -fragmented ba...

This paper models how a nation’s military manpower system affects the decision to go to war. Manpower systems differ primarily in how they distribute costs: the volunteer system shares the war’s manpower costs broadly, while the draft forces a subset of the population to bear a disproportionate share of the load. This difference affects an officeand policy-motivated politician’s decision to go ...

We develop a strategic model of network interdiction in a non-cooperative game of flow. An adversary, endowed with a bounded quantity of bads, chooses a flow specifying a plan for carrying bads through a network from a base to a target. Simultaneously, an agency chooses a blockage specifying a plan for blocking the transport of bads through arcs in the network. The bads carried to the target ca...

We analyze individual satisfaction with life as a whole and satisfaction with the personal financial situation for Israeli citizens of Jewish and Arab descent. Our data set is the Israeli Social Survey (2006). We are especially interested in the impact of the religions Judaism, Islam and Christianity, where we are able to differentiate between individuals who vary in religiosity between secular...

It is today generally acknowledged that social norms are important for moral hazard in social insurance systems. In this paper we study whether local variation in sickness absence can be explained by local variation in norms concerning benefit dependency – formed by social interaction on the neighborhood level. A well known methodological problem in analyses of this issue is how to disentangle ...