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Responding to Threats of Climate Change Mega-Catastrophes
(John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, 2010)
There is a low but uncertain probability that climate change could trigger “mega-catastrophes,” severe and at least partly irreversible adverse effects across broad regions. This paper first discusses the state of current ...
The Methodology of Positive Policy Analysis
(John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, 2010)
Policy analyses frequently clash. Their disagreements stem from many sources, such as models, empirical estimates, values, who should have standing, and weighting of different criteria. We provide a simple taxonomy of ...
Variable Temptations and Black Mark Reputations
(John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, 2011)
In a world of imperfect information, reputations often guide the sequential decisions to trust and to reward trust. We consider two-player situations, where one player – the truster – decides whether to trust, and the other ...
Addressing Catastrophic Risks: Disparate Anatomies Require Tailored Therapies
(John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, 2011)
Catastrophic risks differ in terms of their natural or human origins, their possible amplification by human behaviors, and the relationships between those who create the risks and those who suffer the losses. Given their ...
Health Insurance Exchanges — Making the Markets Work
(Massachusetts Medical Society, 2009)
Americans purchase health insurance in various ways. Some buy individual policies. For them, medical underwriting is common, and preexisting conditions can preclude, limit, or dramatically increase the cost of coverage. ...
The "CAPS" Prediction System and Stock Market Returns
(John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, 2011)
We study the predictive power of approximately 2.5 million stock picks submitted by individual users to the “CAPS” website run by the Motley Fool company (www.caps.fool.com). These picks prove to be surprisingly informative ...
Deterring and Compensating Oil Spill Catastrophes: The Need for Strict and Two-Tier Liablility
(John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, 2011)
The BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill highlighted the glaring weakness in the current liability and regulatory regime for oil spills and for environmental catastrophes more broadly. This article proposes a new liability ...
Generic Script Share and the Price of Brand-Name Drugs: The Role of Consumer Choice
(2012-01-26)
Pharmaceutical expenditures have grown rapidly in recent decades, and now total nearly 10% of health care costs. Generic drug utilization has risen substantially alongside, from 19% of scripts in 1984 to 47% in 2001, thus ...
Disgust Promotes Disposal: Souring the Status Quo
(John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard Uinversiy, 2010)
Humans naturally dispose of objects that disgust them. Is this phenomenon so deeply embedded that even incidental disgust – i.e., where the source of disgust is unrelated to a possessed object – triggers disposal? Two ...
The Trouble with Cases
(2009)
For several decades now a debate has raged about policy-making by litigation. Spurred by the way in which tobacco, environmental, and other litigation has functioned as an alternative form of regulation, the debate asks ...