Jonathan Eyer's research while affiliated with University of Southern California and other places

We analyze a major potential reform of the current FEMA Public Assistance Program that would establish a deductible against the coverage of losses and would offer credits for expenditure on risk reduction by states as an incentive to offset the deductible. While the current FEMA Program is targeted primarily towards repairing damaged property, there is a potential to formulate a Deductible/Credit System (DCS), so as to achieve a reduction in other worthy goals as well, such as reducing fatalities and accelerating recovery. We analyze the effect of the DCS on the achievement of these alternative goals and on state and federal expenditure under various assumptions about which types of disaster losses are eligible for credits. Although the effect of the DCS depends on how states respond to the credit incentive, it is unlikely to reduce total state expenditure on the combination of risk reduction and disaster losses in the short term.

Return migration is key to community recovery from many disasters. Japanese governments have conducted radiation decontamination efforts in the Exclusion Zone designated after the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster in order to encourage this outcome. Little is known, however, about the factors that influence post‐disaster migrants to return, and, if people are relatively unresponsive to decontamination, then the costs of promoting recovery may exceed the benefits. We exploit a unique survey of Fukushima evacuees to determine the factors that influence their decision to return after a disaster. Location‐specific capital characteristics, such as housing tenure and the extent of property damage, are estimated to be strong factors. The radiation dose rate of the home location is found to be a statistically significant factor for intent to return, but its effect is small. We also found that households with various other characteristics were noncommittal about the return option and likely to defer their decisions, which implies that “return” and “not‐return” are asymmetric. Our simulation analysis found that the number of returnees encouraged by this decontamination was 14,367, less than 10% of the total evacuees, while the decontamination cost per returnee was 3.0 million USD. This result implies that the government could have improved the well‐being of evacuees at a lower cost by policies other than decontamination.

Despite equal matriculation into life science graduate programs, the gender gap persists for later-stage professional outcomes. To understand this divergence, we examine graduate training and use the competitive NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program to identify high-quality life science students that are awardees and honorable mentions. We use a differencing research design to estimate the relative difference of the R&D award across gender on publication trajectory. The results of the triple difference estimation show a negative effect for women compared to men from the award. We investigate the driver of this effect by examining trends within gender and find a large, positive effect of the award for men but fail to find such evidence for female awardees. Our results indicate different signaling effects across gender even though the funding is meritocratic.

The share of U.S electricity generated by coal has fallen from nearly 50% to 33%. This transition offers social environmental benefits but spatially concentrated costs as coal miners and their local communities have suffered. Coal states have responded to shifting demand conditions by introducing incentives for local power plants to purchase coal from local mines. We document that power plants in areas with mining activity are more likely to be coal-fired and to purchase more coal from mines which they share a political boundary even after controlling for the distance from power plants to mines. While politically-motivated coal purchases do result in improved conditions in coal-mining counties in some regions of the country, these benefits are likely to be small compared to the additional carbon costs.

This article describes a methodology for risk‐informed benefit–cost analyses of homeland security research products. The methodology is field‐tested with 10 research products developed for the U.S. Coast Guard. Risk‐informed benefit–cost analysis is a tool for risk management that integrates elements of risk analysis, decision analysis, and benefit–cost analysis. The cost analysis methodology includes a full‐cost accounting of research projects, starting with initial fundamental research costs and extending to the costs of implementation of the research products and, where applicable, training, maintenance, and upgrade costs. The benefits analysis methodology is driven by changes in costs and risks leading to five alternative models: cost savings at the same level of security, increased security at the same cost, signal detection improvements, risk reduction by deterrence, and value of information. The U.S. Coast Guard staff selected 10 research projects to test and generalize the methodology. Examples include tools to improve the detection of explosives, reduce the costs of harbor patrols, and provide better predictions of hurricane wind speeds and floods. Benefits models and estimates varied by research project and many input parameters of the benefit estimates were highly uncertain, so risk analysis for sensitivity testing and simulation was important. Aggregating across the 10 research products, we found an overall median net present value of about $385 million, with a range from $54 million (5th percentile) to $877 million (95th percentile). Lessons learned are provided for future applications.

Large-scale electricity outages have the potential to result in substantial business interruption losses. These losses can be reduced through a number of tactics within the broader strategies of mitigation and resilience. This paper presents a methodology for analyzing the tradeoffs between mitigation and three categories of resilience. We derive optimality conditions for various combinations of strategies for a Cobb-Douglas damage function and then explore implications of a less restrictive Constant Elasticity of Substitution damage function. We also calibrate the model and perform Monte Carlo simulations to test the sensitivity of the results with respect to changes in major parameters. Simulation results highlight the possibility that substitution away from mitigation towards resilience may lower total expected costs from large-scale outages for a given level of risk reduction expenditure when the marginal benefit of resilience is high relative to the expected marginal benefit of mitigation.

Implementation of means for enhancing cyber resilience, such as those discussed in the preceding chapters, costs money. Is this a worthwhile investment? This chapter provides an economic perspective on how to choose the most economically appropriate approaches to improving cyber resilience. These considerations are rather complex. For example, property damage, except for destruction of data, has thus far been a relatively minor cost of cyber threats, in contrast to instances of significant loss of functionality of a cyber system itself or the system it helps operate. The latter translates into loss of output (sales revenue and profits) and loss of employment, and is often referred to as business interruption (BI). Thus, in addition to pre-event mitigation, post-disaster strategies that enable a system to rebound more efficiently and quickly offer the prospects of greatly reducing BI. Moreover, there are numerous resilience tactics that comprise a strategy on both the cyber service provider side and customer side, many of which are relatively inexpensive. The latter include backup data storage and equipment, substitutes for standard cyber components, conserving on cyber needs, and recapturing lost production once the cyber capability is restored. This chapter describes the analysis based on basic principles of economics and is couched in a benefit-cost analysis (BCA) framework as an aid to decision-making. This chapter goes beyond the conceptual level and offers estimates of the costs and effectiveness of various mitigation and resilience tactics.

While post-disaster migration can move vulnerable populations from dangerous regions to relatively safe ones, little is known about decisions that migrants use to select new homes. We develop an econometric model of migrant flows to examine the characteristics of the destinations that attracted migrants leaving the New Orleans area following Hurricane Katrina in 2005 relative to migration behaviors in other years. We find an increased flow of migrants to large, nearby counties with a mixed effect of economic variables on migration. We find that counties that had experienced fewer disasters received a greater proportion of total migrants in 2005, but there was an overall increase in migration flow to disaster-prone regions as well.

Large firms are becoming increasingly dominant in the natural gas production industry. At the same time, regulators and environmental groups are concerned about potential environmental damage associated with hydraulic fracturing. However, small firms are protected from the full extent of their damages, while large firms must internalize a greater portion of their social costs. This paper examines the effect of firm size and liability on environmental safety in the context of hydraulic fracturing in Pennsylvania's Marcellus Shale across three dimensions of size. Impacts of firm size on safety are found across legal, regulatory, and brand dimensions of size with the largest effects being driven by changes in regulatory liability. These safety gains are sizable as violation rates would be approximately twice as high if firms at remained at 2008 sizes.

Water withdrawals for the energy sector are the largest use of fresh water in the United States. Using an econometric model of monthly plant-level electricity generation levels between 2001 and 2012, we estimate the effect of water scarcity on the US electricity fuel mix. We find that hydroelectric generation decreases substantially in response to drought, although this baseline generation is offset primarily by natural gas, depending on the geographic region. We provide empirical evidence that drought can increase emissions of CO2 and local pollutants. We quantify the social costs of water scarcity to be $330,000 per month for each plant that experiences a one-standard deviation increase in water scarcity (2015 dollars), a relationship that persists under future projections of water scarcity.