• Environmental and Resource Economics Review
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• v.19 no.4
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• pp.915-961
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• 2010

This study is concerned with health damages from $SO_2$ under different assumptions on the relationship between air concentrations and their marginal health impacts. $SO_2$ concentration profiles resulting under emission caps, and a system of tradable emission allowances are compared. Using slopes and curvatures of the health response function consistent with evidence in medical literature, emission caps are shown to lead to lower aggregate damages under all considered parameters, an advantage of $26~452 million. The benefit of emission caps over tradable allowances increases with the curvature of the response function, but falls with its slope. The advantage of emission caps in terms of environmental damages is never overturned completely for the considered functional forms. The marginal damage function would have to be steeper than what the current medical evidence suggests for price instruments to outperform emission caps in terms of aggregate damages. With other welfare consequences included-emission abatement costs, consumer and producer surpluses, and government revenue-emission caps always lead to a $3.7~4.1 billion greater measure of social welfare.

• KSCE Journal of Civil and Environmental Engineering Research
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• v.29 no.2B
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• pp.173-179
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• 2009

Industrial water supplied by water resource project is essential input materials along with labor, capital and land for companies. It is very important to stably secure these input materials in order for the industry to generate additional values. If the supply of industrial water is stopped, it is known damage for the industry is greater than domestic water or agriculture water based on same amount of supply. Like this, the actual value of industrial water has been highly acknowledged from the intuitive perspective, but study on the value and benefits of industrial water has been rarely conducted. Therefore, this study verified the value of industrial water supplied from water resource project, and used marginal production value as a measure to estimate the benefits of industrial water in the analysis of economic efficiency. As a result of empirical analysis using Cobb-Douglas production function and Translog production function, industries' average marginal production value was $5,427KRW/m^3$ and $5,583KRW/m^3$ respectively. The marginal production value for eleven industries were estimated by using same method. The marginal production value by industries presented by this study will be used as important data to calculate benefits of industrial water in the future. Moreover, the result of this study will provide reasonable criteria for decision making on the allocation of water in emergency situation, and problem of resource supply from water resource project.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Marine Environment & Safety
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• v.14 no.4
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• pp.275-287
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• 2008

Noise externalities are a ubiquitous problem in modern societies. Research to estimate damages and potential efficient solutions therefore is important for addressing such problems. The results of a hedonic property model show that noise has a statistically significant and quantitatively important negative effect on property values. The key results for the best model show that damages (in year 2000 dollars) are - $5000 ${\ast}$ (ln dB), where dB is noise measured in decibels, allowing for the influence of other factors. Because ln(dB) is a strictly concave funaion, the "noise damage function"exhibits diminishing marginal effects with noise.

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• v.31 no.1
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• pp.11-24
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• 2009

In China, the oil and natural gas resources of Bohai Bay are mainly marginal oil fields. It is necessary to build both ice-resistant and economical offshore platforms. However, risk is involved in the design, construction, utilization, maintenance of offshore platforms as uncertain events may occur within the life-cycle of a platform under the extreme ice load. In this study, the optimum design model of the expected life-cycle cost for ice-resistant platforms based on cost-effectiveness criterion is proposed. Multiple performance demands of the structure, facilities and crew members, associated with the failure assessment criteria and evaluation functions of costs of construction, consequences of structural failure modes including damage, revenue loss, death and injury as well as discounting cost over time are considered. An efficient approximate method of the global reliability analysis for the offshore platforms is provided, which converts the implicit nonlinear performance function in the conventional reliability analysis to linear explicit one. The proposed life-cycle optimum design formula are applied to a typical ice-resistant platform in Bohai Bay, and the results demonstrate that the life-cycle cost-effective optimum design model is more rational compared to the conventional design.

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• v.63 no.6
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• pp.809-824
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• 2017

The accurate evaluation of wind characteristics and wind-induced structural responses during a typhoon is of significant importance for bridge design and safety assessment. This paper presents an expectation maximization (EM) algorithm-based angular-linear approach for probabilistic modeling of field-measured wind characteristics. The proposed method has been applied to model the wind speed and direction data during typhoons recorded by the structural health monitoring (SHM) system instrumented on the arch Jiubao Bridge located in Hangzhou, China. In the summer of 2015, three typhoons, i.e., Typhoon Chan-hom, Typhoon Soudelor and Typhoon Goni, made landfall in the east of China and then struck the Jiubao Bridge. By analyzing the wind monitoring data such as the wind speed and direction measured by three anemometers during typhoons, the wind characteristics during typhoons are derived, including the average wind speed and direction, turbulence intensity, gust factor, turbulence integral scale, and power spectral density (PSD). An EM algorithm-based angular-linear modeling approach is proposed for modeling the joint distribution of the wind speed and direction. For the marginal distribution of the wind speed, the finite mixture of two-parameter Weibull distribution is employed, and the finite mixture of von Mises distribution is used to represent the wind direction. The parameters of each distribution model are estimated by use of the EM algorithm, and the optimal model is determined by the values of $R^2$ statistic and the Akaike's information criterion (AIC). The results indicate that the stochastic properties of the wind field around the bridge site during typhoons are effectively characterized by the proposed EM algorithm-based angular-linear modeling approach. The formulated joint distribution of the wind speed and direction can serve as a solid foundation for the purpose of accurately evaluating the typhoon-induced fatigue damage of long-span bridges.