Environmental Economics

Where I'll be tomorrow night

Brad Humphries at The Sports Economist:

The CollegeInsider.com Tournament. A sixteen team single elimination tournament operated by, I think, the people who run the CollegeInsiders.com web site.  This tournament is in its second year of operation.  As best as I can tell, the CIT has no television coverage, but games will be streamed on Fox College Sports broadband.  There appears to be quite a bit of competition between the CBI and the CIT for teams.  A recent newspaper report on the CIT indicates that the Athletic Director at Marshall University, the #1 seed in the CIT, was offered bids to both tournaments and "struck a deal" with the CIT that included the possibility of playing 4 home games.  The CIT financial model is to charge each home team $30,000 per game to participate and allow the home team to keep all gate revenues. participants: Fairfield (22-10), George Mason (17-14), Western Carolina (22-11), Marshall (23-9), South Dakota (22-9), Creighton (16-15), Harvard (21-7), Appalachian State (22-10), Middle Tennessee State (19-13), Missouri State (20-12), Portland (21-10), Northern Colorado (24-7), Pacific (20-11), Loyola Marymount (18-14), Southern Mississippi (20-13), and Louisiana Tech (23-10).

Since "Tickets are $15 for adults and $10 for youth for this game" ASU Athletics will need 2000 paying adults to break even. The Holmes Convo Center seats 8325 so an adult sellout would bring in $124,875 in revenue (and $94,875 net [assuming other costs are offset by concessions]). The only sellouts that I'm aware of were for Davidson College with Stephon Curry. This year we had the second largest crowd in history, 6024, against arch-rival Western Carolina. It will be interesting to see the crowd tomorrow.

Q: Substitutes or complements?

If you're both a very faithful and a very passive Econbrowser reader, for two years now you've sat on the sidelines while you watched other, equally faithful but less passive readers participate in the world-famous Econbrowser NCAA Tournament Challenge, in which brave souls pretend they can predict a significant number of the winners of the games of the NCAA men's basketball tournament. If so, here's your third chance to sit on the sidelines again, or maybe even to participate this time.

If you want to join the fun, just go to the Econbrowser group at ESPN, do some minor registering to create a free ESPN account if you haven't used that site before, and make your picks for the winners of each game. Just make sure you complete your entry before Thursday, because the Econbrowser group only allows predictions before the tournament begins.

You can also enter in the parallel group of the Environmental Economics blog, if you think the competition there is going to be any easier.

May the best prognosticator have the best prognostications!

via www.econbrowser.com

A: Complements!

Env-Econ: The NCAA Tournament Pool 2010

The third (I think) annual EnvEcon NCAA Tournament Pool is open for business.  Entries are free.  The winner gets bragging rights and a highly invaluable "Drive Less" bumper sticker (and with gas prices predicted to creep back above $3 in the spring, what better way to convince people how to make a difference???).  

Just click here to access the EnvEcon group at ESPN.com.   The password is:  capntrade.   You need to create an ESPN.com account to join, but it's relatively painless and you can opt out of all the spam.

Lecture on “Climate Policy: Pre- and Post-Copenhagen” held March 17

Climate economist Jason Shogren will speak on “Climate Policy: Pre- and Post-Copenhagen” March 17 at 5 p.m. in Room 114 Belk Library and Information Commons. The talk is open to the public. It is sponsored by Appalachian’s Research Institute for Environment, Energy and Economics.

via www.scene.appstate.edu

The WSJ's The Numbers Guy on estimates of the economic impact of natural disasters

Though the Haitian earthquake in January killed about 500 times as many people as the massive tremor in Chile last month, the Chilean quake wiped out more economic value.

The true economic impact, and the cost of rebuilding, will take years to tally. Yet even on the day of the 8.8-magnitude quake, damage estimates emerged, pegging the loss at $15 billion to $30 billion. That compares with costs in the low-single-digit billions of dollars for Haiti.

While these numbers grab headlines, they frequently have little to do with the ultimate economic cost, according to the reinsurance companies that protect insurers from big losses.

A handful of companies produce the rapid damage calculations using computer reconstructions of earthquakes and other natural disasters. Prior estimates' track records are mixed: These firms mostly low-balled the Hurricane Katrina price tag in 2005, for example.

via online.wsj.com

You ever been in a cockpit before?

Actor Peter Graves, best known for his starring role on TV's "Mission: Impossible," died Sunday. He was 83.

via www.cnn.com

I disagree. Maybe it shows my age, but I best remember Peter Graves for this.

Grudge match

App State to host Harvard:

In their first postseason appearance at the Holmes Convocation Center, App State will host Harvard on Wednesday night. The Crimson come into the first round of the CollegeInider.com [sic] Tournament with a 21-7 overall record.

GoASU.com reports this is the first meeting between the two schools and ASU has never played any of the eight Ivy League schools.

My standard friendly wager is Vegas line (but usually the point spread is negotiable), loser buys matching t-shirts (of the losing school), winner and loser wears them on the same day raising the question (why?), loser then must explain that s/he is a loser. It's hard to imagine Mankiw or Stavins or Beggs wearing an App State t-shirt (or me wearing a Harvard t-shirt) but there it is: I'm happy to accept any friendly wager from any Harvard econ-type.

The municipal cost of beach erosion

All told, the homes on the nuisance list account for $6.36 million of lost tax valuations, $26,000 in annual local property taxes according to Nags Head Town Manager Cliff Ogburn. Add to those figures $720,000 (assuming $30,000 per house) in gross rents and $91,800 in occupancy and other taxes. Over a decade, this tallies to over $1.1 million in lost taxes and $7.2 million in gross rental receipts. These totals do not include the dollars and sales taxes spent by the renters while on vacation here.

via outerbanksvoice.com

The nuisance list includes houses that are about to be washed away by the ocean.

Of course, the municipal costs aren't costs more generally as vacationers can find other places to go.

Sea level at N.C. coast could be a DeMarcus Cousins higher by 2100

The Cape Hatteras National Seashore in North Carolina is a chain of thin, low barrier islands with a low sand supply. Sea level rise is already narrowing the width of the islands (by shoreline erosion on both sides).

Thanks to a lifetime of studies by Stan Riggs, professor of geology at East Carolina University, these may be the best understood barrier islands in the world. Riggs believes the islands may "collapse" or disappear, possibly within the next few decades. With each increment of sea level rise, the possibility of collapse increases. He anticipates that in a storm of sufficient duration and intensity, a large number of new inlets could open up, simultaneously isolating the eight small tourist villages within the National Seashore. If Riggs is right, a large portion of the Outer Banks will become a long, submerged sandbar quite similar to Louisiana's Isles Dernieres after Hurricane Katrina.

Sadly, the North Carolina Department of Transportation has not heeded this warning. A multimillion-dollar bridge spanning Oregon Inlet, a part of the National Seashore, will be rebuilt in the exact location of the current Bonner Bridge even though it is likely to go to sea within the life span of the bridge.

via www.news-record.com

I've wondered aloud whether the no-bridge-plus-ferries option might have higher net benefits than a replacement bridge. And that was without the sea level rise issue.

Pi Time

Urban word of the day for March 14:

The time of the day where a digital clock reads 3:14.

Dude, what time is? Dude, it's pi time.

Coincidentally, or not, my oldest daughter was born on Pi day. Happy Birthday oldest daughter!