Local governments like the City and County of San Francisco have shouldered the burden of toxic chemicals released into the environment through the substantial costs of health care, environmental cleanup, and infrastructure to purify drinking water, manage wastewater, and manage solid waste. Cities can no longer afford to wait for federal regulation to prevent toxic chemicals from appearing in ...

We use three conventional inequality indices—the Gini, the coefficient of variation of income, and the relative mean deviation of income—and the Atkinson index to examine the effect of income tax rates, the minimum wage, and all the major government welfare and transfer programs on the evolution of income inequality for rural and urban areas by state from 1981 to 1997. We find that these progra...

Through a cost-minimizing approach, this paper derives four joint indicators to assess the ef…ciency of the mix of sovereign debt currencies between the countries belonging to the European Monetary Union (EMU). This theoretical insight enables us to explain why and how the introduction of the euro and the adoption of a common monetary policy may have led to signi…cant changes in debt structure ...

This memorandum analyses the fundamental characteristics of the natural gas market and its consequences for government policies. In the past, the European gas market was dominated by state-owned monopolists but since the start of the liberalisation, privatisation and re-regulation in the early 1990s, the market has fundamentally changed. Nevertheless, governments are still involved in the gas i...

As information is increasingly managed electronically, policies and government regulations intended to protect personal privacy are increasing the requirements complexity of software systems. These regulations and policies are frequently developed by lawyers and domain experts – not engineers – resulting in complex and ambiguous legal language. To ensure software complies with the law, software...

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The explicit or implicit protection of banks through government bail-out policies is a universal phenomenon. We analyze the competitive effects of such policies in two models with different degrees of transparency in the banking sector. Our main result is that the bail-out policy unambiguously leads to higher risk-taking at those banks that do not enjoy a bail-out guarantee. The reason is that ...

U.S. Government Web sites are rapidly increasing the services they offer, but users express concerns about their personal privacy protection. To earn user’s trust, these sites must show that personal data is protected, and the sites contain explicit privacy policies. This research studied privacy policy protection of 50 U.S. Senate sites and found that few had comprehensive elements of privacy ...

Public Administration aims at producing value for citizens; the use of ICTs to improve government and governance, as implied by e-Government, can be considered as a means to increase the public value produced by Public Administration. As a consequence, the policies for e-Government can be evaluated according to their ability to increase the Public Administration capacity of producing public val...