This paper discusses how an industrialized country could defend the living standard of its unskilled workers against the wage competition from immigrants. It shows that fixing social replacement incomes implies migration into unemployment. Defending wages with replacement incomes brings about first order efficiency losses that approximate the budget cost of the government. By contrast, wage sub...

The dense wavelength division multiplexing routing and provisioning problem with uncertain demands and a fixed budget is modeled as a multicriteria optimization problem. To obtain a robust design for this problem, the primary objective is to minimize a regret function that models the total amount of over and/or under provisioning in the network resulting from uncertainty in a demand forecast. P...

Commercial plant breeders improve economically important traits by selectively mating individuals from a given breeding population. Potential pairings are evaluated before the growing season using Monte Carlo simulation, and a mating design is created to allocate a fixed breeding budget across the parent pairs to achieve desired population outcomes. We introduce a novel objective function for t...

In this article we present a model to examine the optimal location, size, and budget of open space conservation and the resulting impact on land values and local fiscal conditions in an urban area. Results indicate that open space conservation can transform the defining features of an urban landscape. A well-designed open space conservation program can improve municipal services, increase total...

The Office of Management and Budget requested in 2004 that the Department of Energy, Office of Science, Office of High Energy Physics (HEP) develop a set of long-term goals in Scientific Advancement to which the HEP program is committed. These goals (attached) are meant to be representative of the important priorities of the program, are not meant to be comprehensive, and are not necessarily go...

Early retirement incentives (ERIs) are increasingly prevalent in education as districts seek to close budget gaps by replacing expensive experienced teachers with lower-cost newer teachers. Combined with the aging of the teacher workforce, these ERIs are likely to change the composition of teachers dramatically in the coming years. We use exogenous variation from an ERI program in Illinois in t...