No abstract

As sea level rises, urban traffic networks in low-lying coastal areas face increasing risks of flood disruptions. Closure of flooded roads causes employee absences and delays, creating cascading impacts to communities. We integrate a traffic model with flood maps that represent potential combinations of storm surges, tides, seasonal cycles, interannual anomalies driven by large-scale climate variability such as the El Niño Southern Oscillation, and sea level rise. When identifying inundated roads, we propose corrections for potential biases arising from model integration. Our results for the San Francisco Bay Area show that employee absences are limited to the homes and workplaces within the areas of inundation, while delays propagate far inland. Communities with limited availability of alternate roads experience long delays irrespective of their proximity to the areas of inundation. We show that metric reach, a measure of road network density, is a better proxy for delays than flood exposure.

Zhou Li-an, an economist, proposed a "tournament model" of competition to explain the design of incentives created by the central government to influence the behavior of local government officials in China. 3 The tournament model, first developed in the economics literature, 4 describes an incentive design in which performance is evaluated comparatively among a pool of candidates competing for career advancement or other rewards. The high performers are promoted into the next round of the tournament for further career advancement. Tournament competition as an incentive mechanism has several advantages for a "principal" in ensuring that "agents" perform at a high level to meet the principal's objectives. 5 The most salient advantage is that it introduces competition within an organizational hierarchy based on rules set by the principal, thereby allowing the principal to align the agents' interests with his or her own. Another important feature is that relative performance-based evaluation elicits valuable information about the agents' performance, at relatively low cost in measuring the agents' efforts. Zhou posits that the Chinese central authority introduced competition among subordinate officials by basing promotions of chief officials in local governments on their relative performance evaluations, thus motivating local officials to act in ways consistent with meeting the goals of the central authority. For example, China's central government has made GDP growth the main yardstick in evaluating the relative performance of local leaders, and this measure has provided incentives for local governments to foster rapid economic growth in their jurisdictions. At first glance, this line of argument seems consistent with widespread practices among Chinese governments, in which higher authorities rank-order their subordinate officials at lower levels of government, based on relative performance. Tournament-like practices have been employed extensively by local governments to introduce competition among subordinates in the pursuit of loc al governments' goals, such as attracting inflows of foreign investment, enforcing family planning policies and meeting pollution reduction goals. For example,

No abstract

No abstract