Assessing the externalities of electricity generation in the Midwest

This paper summarizes the research strategy adopted in developing separate estimates of environmental costs for two major private utility systems. One of the systems, North States Power Company in Minnesota, is used to describe the model structure. Particular focus was given to developing methods to assist in the transfer of damage function and monetary valuation estimates to other locations and contexts.     

Local air pollution and global climate change: A combined cost-benefit analysis

This article presents the findings of a combined cost-benefit analysis of local air pollution and global climate change, two subjects that are usually studied separately. Yet these distinct environmental problems are closely related, since they are both driven by the nature of present energy production and consumption patterns. Our study demonstrates the mutual relevance of, and interaction between, policies designed to address these two environmental challenges individually. Given the many dimensions air pollution control and climate change management have in common, it is surprising that they have only little been analyzed in combination so far. We attempt to cover at least part of the existing gap in the literature by assessing how costs and benefits of technologies and strategies that jointly tackle these two environmental problems can best be balanced. By using specific technological options that cut down local air pollution, e.g. related to particulate emissions, one may concurrently reduce CO₂ emissions and thus contribute to diminishing global climate change. Inversely, some of the long-term climate change strategies simultaneously improve the quality of air in the short run. We have extended the well-established MERGE model by including emissions of particulate matter, and show that integrated environmental policies generate net global welfare benefits. We also demonstrate that the discounted benefits of local air pollution reduction significantly outweigh those of global climate change mitigation, at least by a factor of 2, but in most cases of our sensitivity analysis much more. Still, we do not argue to only restrict energy policy today to what should be our first priority, local air pollution control, and wait with the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions. Instead, we propose to design policies that simultaneously address these issues, as their combination creates an additional climate change bonus. As such, climate change mitigation proves an ancillary benefit of air pollution reduction, rather than the other way around.     

水土流失对都昌县中小型水库危害与防治对策

分析了水土流失对都昌县中小型水库工程的危害，并提出了综合防治对策和措施。     

A semiparametric technique to estimate survival probabilities

The role of the so-called surplus processes in the assessment of probability of survival of a company is well-known in risk theory and applications thereof. However, the insurance models used in this regard ignore the fact that, in many situations, no relevant information is available for the assessment of survival after the company goes out of business. In this paper, we revisit the classical risk model in order to remedy this situation. Having stopped the deficit process, which is negative of the surplus process, at the time of ruin, under two different sampling schemes, we obtain inference procedure for ruin probabilities. As by products of our methodology, we also obtain procedures to assess the reliability of systems whose survival depends on a cumulative damage process, which is equivalent to the aggregate claim size process of the classical risk model.