Sylvia Brandt

A Tale Of Two Clams: Policy Anticipation And Industry Productivity

Sylvia Brandt — Wed, 14 Mar 2012 09:37:30 PDT

Sound environmental regulation must achieve environmental objectives while maximizing economic efficiency. This paper evaluates the impact of regulation on efficiency by measuring annual productivity across regulatory regimes in two similar fisheries with differing policy expectations. Anticipation of regulatory change produced strategic behavior in one fishery, leading to depressed productivity; in the other, regulatory change was not expected, and productivity did not suffer. These results imply that fisheries regulation should take into account both firms' policy expectations and the potentially perverse incentives that may be created by policy change.

Asthma Management Survey of Participants in an Inner City Asthma Intervention

Sylvia Brandt et al. — Wed, 14 Mar 2012 09:33:54 PDT

Background: The Inner City Asthma Intervention (ICAI) was a national multi-center implementation of an evidence-based intervention to reduce asthma morbidity. Objective: This study describes mitigating behaviors and reported outcomes in families with asthma who completed the intervention and a post-intervention survey at one of the ICAI sites. Results: Eighty percent (0.72- 0.88, 95% confidence interval) of these families made five or more changes to mitigate exposure to environmental asthma triggers. The majority of families (0.84-0.96, 95% confidence interval) reported an improved awareness of asthma symptoms and less school absences, limitations of activity, unplanned doctor visits, and asthma related sleep disruption

The Effects of ITQ Management on Fishermen’s Welfare When the Processing Sector is Imperfectly Competitive

Sylvia Brandt et al. — Wed, 14 Mar 2012 09:31:34 PDT

In this paper we use a general model of imperfect competition to predict welfare changes within an open-access fishery transitioning to individual transferable quota (ITQ) management. Although related research has explored the effects of market power in the harvesting sector on ITQ performance, none have considered the implications of an imperfectly competitive processing sector. This study addresses this question specifically in the context of the Atlantic herring fishery, although its implications are relevant to all fisheries with similar industry structure. Our results show that ITQs could have a negative impact on fishermen’s welfare when processors have market power and the cap on aggregate harvest is binding or becomes binding with the implementation of ITQs.