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| CBS Evening News (9/1/06) | CNBC Closing Bell (9/15/05) | CSPAN2 Today in Washington (8/23/06) |
"... I received a note from Tjalling Koopmans asking whether I had really said that if Manhattan was bombed, the best way to evacuate the population would be to use the price system. I was taken aback by his letter, because I had not even thought of that problem. But I told Tjalling that the first time Manhattan was bombed any system of would be grotesquely confused and inefficient. If the bombings became repetitive, however, I thought the price system could handle the problem well. The first half of my answer was surely correct, and I believe now even more than I did then in the market system's flexibility, adaptability, and resourcefulness in finding new ways to make money." George J. Stigler, from Memoirs of an Unregulated Economist (Basic Books, 1985), p. 61.
One of my research interests is the economic analysis of FEMA.
In
particular I focus on how political pressures and favoritism play a
large role in government disaster relief efforts and funding, and also
on how disaster relief might better be handled by the private
sector.
I published a paper with Tom Garrett, one of
my Ph.D. students here at West Virginia University on this topic (see
below). Tom is now at
the St. Louis Federal Reserve Bank and his email is Tom.A.Garrett@stls.frb.org.
Because of FEMA's failure in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, our
research has become quite heavily cited in the media, and in new
academic studies on FEMA. More recently, I have done several new
research papers with my fellow WVU colleague Peter T. Leeson and his
email is
Pete.Leeson@mail.wvu.edu.
This page below contains information
about my research on FEMA and the media coverage we have received.
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| CBS Evening News (9/1/06) | CNBC Closing Bell (9/15/05) | CSPAN2 Today in Washington (8/23/06) |
CBS Evening News. I was interviewed for
the CBS Evening News for a story on FEMA that was broadcast during
their 6:30pm evening news on Friday, September 1, 2006. A video
of my original full-length interview can be found by following the link
above.
Tom and I were interviewed on CNBC's
top rated national news
program, "Closing Bell" at 4:00 p.m. on September 15, 2005.
If you are using a high-bandwidth computer, and
have the right
plug-ins, you can watch it in streaming video (three
options):
Quicktime
IPTV MPEG1
IPTV MPEG2
(High Quality)
If not, you can download the ZIP file and watch the
MPG version
by clicking here. (appx. size is
400MB, so
it might take a while)
My presentation of research findings from my paper
"Weathering Corruption" with
coauthor Peter Leeson on FEMA corruption (presentation held at the National
Press Club's First Amendment Room as part of their Newsmaker Media
Briefing series) was carried live on CSPAN2's "Today in
Washington" on August 23, 2006 from 9:30-11am, and also rebroadcast
that evening at 9pm. The presentation was part of a program
entitled "The Crisis of Katrina: Lessons for Preparedness and
Response." This work is part of a grant project I'm doing as an
Affiliated Senior Scholar with George Mason University's Mercatus
Center. The paper in PDF format is at the link above, and a
video of my presentation is on the
CSPAN
website here (but you need the most recent version of Real Player
for it, my presentation begins at 27:45 into the video and ends at
38:45, then my Q&A begins at 1:02:50). Stories about the
paper have been picked up by several media outlets including the
Washington Post,
National Review, Mobile Alabama
Press-Register, Houston Chronicle, The Epoch Times, the American Urban Radio
Network, Delaware News Journal, Charleston Gazette, and the
Christian Science Monitor. The
Economist magazine also carried a story about our
research entitled "Blame the Weather" as a boxed feature on page 28 of
the September 2-8, 2006 edition.
My original paper with Tom Garrett has also been the topic of two
articles in the New
York Times:
"At FEMA, Disasters and
Politics Go Hand in
Hand" by Alan B. Krueger (September 15, 2005, Section C; Page 2)
"Disaster Aid: The Mix Of
Mercy and Politics"
by David E. Rosenbaum (November 2, 2003, Section 4; Page 1)
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A "public policy" version of the paper for a non-academic
audience, with an expanded section on private relief efforts was
published by the Cato Institute as Policy Analysis Paper no. 573, and
it can be found here. An op-ed on FEMA
reform released in advance of the study appeared in the
Philadelphia Inquirer on July 11, 2006, and it can be found
here, and a longer press release
version was published in the Montana
Standard. On the one year anniversary of Katrina, we revised
our
Cato editorial on FEMA reform (paying particular attention to the
central planning aspect) and it ran in the Tallahassee
Democrat, Houston Chronicle, Harrisburg Patriot-News,
Newark Star-Ledger, Connecticut Hour, and the
NY Times Herald-Record.
Peter Leeson and I just finished a research paper entitled "Weathering Corruption" that explores the link between FEMA disaster money and state officials being convicted on federal corruption charges. The paper is forthcoming in The Journal of Law and Economics. See the media coverage section above for more information on the paper's coverage at the National Press Club and on CSPAN2. We also presented this paper in the Mercatus Center's Capital Hill Campus series to a number of congressional staff members in the Rayburn House Office Building on Aug. 29, 2006. An article ran in our University's student newspaper, the Daily Athenaeum, about our work on FEMA corruption.
We also published an article in Worth Magazine on FEMA failure and the topic of privatization of disaster relief.
Our most recent completed work is a paper on the use of knowledge in disaster relief management that is forthcoming in The Independent Review. It can be found here:
