President Biden’s first-day memo “Modernizing Regulatory Review” directs the Office of Management and Budget to “propose procedures that take into account the distributional consequences of regulations… to ensure that regulatory initiatives appropriately benefit and do not inappropriately burden disadvantaged, vulnerable, or marginalized communities.” This paper makes two contributions. First, it discusses how economic analysis can transparently provide the information needed to make value-judgments about what distributional effects are appropriate and inappropriate. Second, it discusses the distributional consequences of regulations that are either designed to reduce internalities or might have the additional benefit of reducing internalities. Examples include tobacco product regulations, appliance energy efficiency standards, and automobile fuel efficiency standards. In many cases, the regulations will increase the prices or decrease the availability of goods that disadvantaged consumers prefer. This paper discussed how to determine whether restricting their consumption opportunities creates net benefits or net costs for disadvantaged consumers. Inframarginal consumers who do not change their consumption face higher opportunity costs but do not receive any benefits from reduced internalities. Empirical challenges include the need to quantify the fraction of inframarginal consumers and the size of the internalities.

High-tunnel (HT) systems have been shown to effectively improve yields, fruit quality and profitability. In order to maximize returns on investment, HTs are frequently planted successively with both winter and summer cash crops and may include >2 crop cycles per year in some climates. The intense cultivation strategies used in HT systems necessitate increased tillage and nutrient demands posing challenges for soil health, environmental quality and long-term economic sustainability, particularly among organic growers. Seasonal rotations that incorporate fertility-building cover crops, such as legumes and other green manures, have the potential to build soil organic matter, improve crop yield and reduce applications of animal manure and/or compost. The economic impact of cover crop use in HT production systems poses important implications for organic growers. In this study, we present three partial budget analyses to quantify the economic benefits from a leguminous winter cover crop–tomato cash crop rotation in HTs across three regions. Data used in the economic analysis come from multi-year organic HT field trials in Kansas (2016–2019), Kentucky (2016–2019) and Minnesota (2016–2020). Direct financial benefits from hairy vetch (Vicia villosa) cover crop N credits were observed but not sufficient to offset the direct and indirect costs of the cover crop practice. A winter cover crop used in organic HT vegetable systems results in negative financial benefits to producers even with conservation incentive payments. These results highlight challenges for organic growers who are required under the USDA National Organic Program to incorporate soil building practices as part of their rotation schedule. The findings will also be of interest to policy makers as they refine cost-share offerings and programming to incentivize cover crop adoption as a conservation strategy.

The relationship between participation in revolt and individuals' economic conditions is among the most debated in political science. While conventional economic theory suggests that those who face the poorest economic prospects are most inclined to fight, extant evidence is decidedly mixed. We address this puzzling variation by analyzing the interplay between macro-structural conditions and individuals' micro-level circumstances. Under conditions of severe group repression, we show how a “glass-ceiling” logic may operate: among the repressed group, those with relatively high productive potential may be most motivated to revolt. We test this with in-depth analysis of participation in the 1993–2003 Burundian insurgency. The data are consistent with numerous implications of the glass-ceiling logic and inconsistent with extant alternative explanations.

Research investigating the association between women's work–family trajectories and their retirement intentions is limited. Studies considering how different institutional conditions affect this association are even more limited. To fill this gap, we use the first three waves of the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe, 2004–2009, and apply two-level random effects models with country-level fixed effects to a sample of mothers aged 50–64 years. Our dependent variable is the intention to retire as early as possible. We found that the following two different mechanisms are associated with mothers' early retirement intentions: (a) strategies to compensate for opportunity costs and (b) work attachment. When all other factors are equal, mothers with a work career characterised by interruptions and part-time work intend to work longer than other mothers, indicating the need to compensate for lower lifelong earnings at older ages. Some compensatory strategies are also observed among mothers who are classified as ‘never married’, ‘divorced’ or ‘widowed’, who wish to continue their careers. In other cases, evidence supporting work attachment mechanisms is found; for instance, working when the youngest child is younger than six years predicts the intention to delay retirement. These results change according to the welfare regime, underlining the importance of family policies and pension benefits to counterbalance the effect of opportunity costs on mothers' earnings.

The international aid community presents education and employment programs as the keys to mitigating youth participation in violence. Yet, existing evidence suggests that faith in such programs may be misplaced. This study investigates this disconnect between faith and evidence. It argues that education and employment programs are commonly built on an economically-focused “dominant discourse” that makes presumptions about youth and their interests. Based on qualitative research with youth in Nairobi, Kenya, it further argues that this dominant discourse overlooks self-identity and social connectedness factors that are crucial to youth, as well as the limitations imposed by governance and structural conditions.

The current rapid decline in biodiversity in human-dominated agricultural landscapes, both in Europe and worldwide, impacts on the provision of environmental services essential to human well-being. There is, therefore, a pressing need to develop and implement incentive-based conservation policies to counteract the ongoing loss of biodiversity. This paper presents results of a regionally-scaled conservation procurement auction, a type of incentive-based payments for environmental services (PES), targeted at the conservation of arable plant diversity. By matching arable fields that were participating in the PES scheme to control fields that were not enrolled in the PES scheme, two critical key characteristics were addressed, namely additionality and bid prices. Additionality was addressed by evaluating whether fields for which PES were issued had significantly higher arable plant diversity than the matched control fields. The cost-effectiveness of a conservation auction increases if payments compensate just farmers’ opportunity costs (in terms of forgone production); bid prices of participating farmers were thus also evaluated to determine whether they were related to their individual opportunity costs. The PES scheme proved to be highly effective in ensuring environmental services delivery through enhanced arable plant diversity on participating fields. In contrast, the potential of the proposed conservation auction design to raise cost-effectiveness has to be questioned, because bid prices submitted in this scheme substantially exceeded individual farmers’ opportunity costs. Therefore, bid prices were most likely influenced by socioeconomic factors other than opportunity costs. This case study illustrates potentials and pitfalls associated with the implementation of a PES scheme and, by evaluating the effectiveness of the scheme, contributes to an improved understanding of incentive-based mechanisms for both policymakers and practitioners involved in PES scheme design and implementation.

This lesson describes how a government decides whether and how much it should spend on vulnerability reduction. There are techniques and methods by which decision-makers compare development alternatives. The differences between the risk that a potentially catastrophic event will occur and uncertainty are described, with uncertainty providing greater difficulty in economic analyses. There is a range of methods for identifying the complex mix of competing costs and benefits associated with any restructuring of investment priorities to accomplish disaster mitigation. The possibilities are described in terms of the opportunity costs and present value. Impact and consequent losses include: (1) direct monetary effects; (2) indirect monetary effects; (3) direct, non-monetary effects; (4) indirect, non-monetary effects; and (5) loss of non-renewable natural resources. The difficulties in assigning values to these effects are described, as well as the means of judging the costeffectiveness of such interventions. An advantage of screening projects using a framework of analytical methods is that it can assist in focusing on a variety of possible outcomes and make the factors influencing these outcomes quite explicit.

While conservation activities are underfunded almost everywhere, the gap between current expenditure and what is needed is particularly extreme in the tropics where threatened species and habitats are most concentrated. We examine how to bridge this funding gap. Firstly, we try to identify who in principle should pay, by comparing the spatial distribution of the costs and the benefits of tropical conservation. The immediate opportunity costs of conservation often exceed its more obvious, management-related costs, and are borne largely by local communities. Conversely, we argue that the greatest benefits of conservation derive from ecological services, and from option, existence, and bequest values; these are often widely dispersed and enjoyed in large part by wealthier national and global beneficiaries. We conclude that the gap in funding tropical conservation should be borne largely by national and especially global communities, who receive most benefit but currently pay least cost. In the second part of the paper we review recent developments in order to examine how in practice increased funding may be raised. There are many growing and novel sources of support: private philanthropy, premium pricing for biodiversity-related goods via certification schemes, and the development of entirely new markets for environmental services. Despite their potential, we conclude that the principal route for meeting the unmet costs of tropical conservation will have to be via governments, and will inevitably require the transfer of substantial resources from north to south. This will be enormously difficult, both politically and logistically, but without it we believe that much of what remains of tropical nature will be lost.

Resource-poor farmers often have diverse but small quantities of materials available that might be used to manage soil fertility. Opportunity costs of money are very high and farmers often opt to invest their scarce financial resources elsewhere rather than in fertilizer. This paper presents an approach to adaptive research and technology dissemination that was applied in Uganda and is applicable for improvement of integrated nutrient management (INM) in resource-poor farming systems. While little information may be available from research conducted in a particular agroecological zone (AEZ), information on INM components from diverse sources may be applicable for major crops in that AEZ. This information must be compiled and subjected to agronomic and economic analysis. A conceptual framework, e.g., in the form of a tentative decision guide, is then constructed, with consideration of interactions among nutrient sources, given the farmers' situations. Researchers estimate the most likely rates of application and substitution ratios, and then judge their confidence in the estimates. Priority actions are then identified for research and extension. When confident of their estimates, researchers formulate recommendations for promotion through extension means. If confidence is lacking, on-farm verification trials or other research may be needed. The approach is illustrated by work done for one AEZ in Uganda for maize and dry bean production, but is intended for application to other resource-poor farming systems in eastern Africa.

This paper presents the economic perspectives applied when either using or not using opportunity costs of postponed replacement in deriving the economic value of herd life. Results show the equivalence of the rescaling method and the correction for opportunity costs. In economic terms, using rescaling or correction for opportunity costs forces the value of genetic improvement to change from revenues of increased output to reduction of costs per unit of (fixed) ouput. Under the zero profit theory, the economic value of herd life is equal when either using or not using correction for opportunity costs. In deriving economic values to define breeding goals, the choice of a method and price parameters will have to depend on foreseen future production circumstances for the system under study.