Horan, Richard D.

April, 2009

By: Xie, Fang; Horan, Richard D.
This paper investigates private responses and ecological impacts of policies proposed to confront the problem of brucellosis being spread from elk to cattle in Wyoming. The policies consist of combinations of changes in elk feeding and population levels. Farmers' responses to these dynamics are modeled along with the associated impacts to livestock population dynamics. Our findings suggest that feedbacks between jointly determined disease dynamics and decentralized economic behavior matter, and the elk feedgrounds do not actually generate economic harm to the individual farmers.

December, 2001

By: Horan, Richard D.; Claassen, Roger; Howe, Lance
Most economic studies of pollution control analyze policies that are optimal for a given set of underlying parameters. Less understood is how such policies perform when the underlying parameters change and policies are not adjusted in response, or what the benefits of adjustment are. We construct several measures of welfare sensitivity and use them to analyze the welfare impacts arising in a simulation of second-best, agri-environmental policies.