Without a License, or Accidents Waiting to Happen

Accidents Waiting to Happen: Liability Policy and Toxic Pollution Releases

Proponents of environmental policies based on liability assert that strict liability imposed on polluters induces firms to handle hazardous wastes properly. We run regressions relating unintended pollution releases to strict liability imposed on polluters, exploiting variation across states and over time in the liability provisions of state mini-Superfund laws. Strict liability reduces the freq...

A Disaster Waiting to Happen

Suppose we organise a golf tournament in which 100 people play a round. Is the score of the tournament winner a reasonable estimate of his future scores? If the field consists of players of similar abilities, then the winner is likely to be one of the better players, but he will also have to be lucky on the day. The winner's score is likely to be above his personal average, for if he had not be...

Waiting for Determinism to Happen

Avian influenza--a pandemic waiting to happen?

Cross-species transmission of a highly pathogenic subtype of influenza A virus directly from birds to humans has raised many concerns. The radical methods of immune evasion and the possibility of human-to-human transmission as a result of gene reassortment between the human and avian viral subtypes pose an imminent threat of a global pandemic. The growing reservoir of circulating influenza amon...

3. Accidents Will Happen

Few students of the subject of intoxicants and traffic safety now doubt that marijuana, like alcohol, can exert detrimental influence. Just how detrimental is debatable. The debate pits optimists ("it's much less of a problem than alcohol") versus those on the pessimistic side ("but who needs any new problems?"). Yet there can be no question that some drivers who met their ends on the highway w...