Environmental Health Regulation of Particulate Matter: Application of the
Theory of Irreversible Investments
Michael Phelan
Environmental health policy
decisions are characterized by irreversibility and uncertainty of an
economic, ecological and biomedical nature. Economic analysis of
problems of this kind fall within the framework of the theory of
irreversible investments as applied to the sunk costs and sunk benefits
of environmental regulation. The proposed research describes an
application of the basic theory to problems associated with the
regulation of particulate matter in environmental health policy.
The first line of investigation models the social costs of regulation in
light of current scientific, medical and economic understanding of
problems associated with particulate matter. A particular emphasis is
given to representation of health effects. All such models involve
however some uncertain parameters, so a second line of investigation
integrates modern practices of stochastic inference with sequential
policy designs. An important goal is to characterize fully the role of
uncertainty and information on the design and implementation of policy,
particularly learning strategies designed to address key uncertainties.
The analytical tools will be implemented numerically using MATHEMATICA |
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