| 1. |
- Andersson, Henrik, et al.
(författare)
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Bullervärden för samhällsekonomisk analys : beräkningar för väg- och järnvägsbuller
- 2009
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Rapport (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Noise is a significant social problem. For example, more than 20 per cent of the European Union's population is exposed to higher noise than what is considered acceptable. The transport sector is a major contributor to society's increasing noise problem, due to increased traffic volumes and urbanization exposing more people to noise. Road traffic is admittedly the largest individual noise source in the transport sector, but other transport modes such as aircraft and railways are also responsible for considerable noise emissions. Noise entails costs for the society. This fact, and that society has different needs, means that policies and projects to reduce noise levels need to be evaluated to secure an efficient resource allocation. Benefit cost analysis is a powerful tool to evaluate noise abatement, but it requires both benefits and costs to be measured in a common metric, i.e. in monetary values. Today's official monetary values for all modes are based on the impact of road-traffic noise on property prices. It is a well established fact that the disturbance which individuals experience differs between modes, and therefore there is a need to estimate monetary values based on the respective modes. This report focuses on road and rail noise, two noise sources with different characteristics. This study describes the need to revise the current official Swedish policy values for noise abatement. Current values for road-traffic noise show a progressive relationship between the social cost and the noise level that is too strong, and values for railway noise has been missing and instead based on results for road noise. Valuation of health effects should also be based on EKM since it is sanctioned within the EU, instead of the approach now proposed by ASEK based on estimated total social costs from noise exposure in relation to estimates from willingness to pay studies.
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| 2. |
- Andersson, Henrik, et al.
(författare)
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Property prices and exposure to multiple noise sources : hedonic regression with road and railway noise
- 2008
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Rapport (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This study examines the effect of road and railway noise on property prices. It uses the hedonic regression technique on a Swedish data set that contains information about both road and railway noise for each property, and finds that road noise has a larger negative impact on the property prices than railway noise. This is in line with the evidence from the acoustical literature which has shown that individuals are more disturbed by road than railway noise, but contradicts recent results from a hedonic study on data of the United Kingdom.
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| 3. |
- Brundell-Freij, Karin, et al.
(författare)
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Accepting charging : a matter of trusting the effects?
- 2009
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Konferensbidrag (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The public typically considers urban congestion to be a serious problem. In the scientific community it is considered basic knowledge that pricing is often the only effective way to mitigate such congestion. However, implementation of congestion charging continues to meet hard resistance from the public, and politicians continue to rule out that policy option referring to lack of public acceptance. Many authors have explained the paradox by the public?s (layman) suspicion that charging would not be effective and not reduce congestion. From a number of implemented schemes, we also know that once they have experience from (the effects of) charging, the public tend to change to more positive, which seems to support the hypothesis that lack of experience and erroneous subjective predictions of effects causes ?the problem?.To analyse the hypothesized causal link this study explores how the (i)attitudes towards congestion charging in Stockholm and (ii)the expectancy/understanding of the effects of charging (co-)varied over time and between individuals in the Stockholm public during different phases of the implementation process: before (autumn 2005) and during the Trial (spring 2006), and after permanent introduction of charging (autumn 2007).For the analyses, we have employed ordinal logit models. This allows us to draw conclusions on the simultaneous relation(s) between acceptance on one hand and individual background characteristics, personal experience and understanding of effects on the other. One of the many advantages with the analytical approach employed is that it allows us to control for, for example, car ownership in the analyses of gender differences in attitudes and predicted effects ? which has given new insights compared to the one-dimensional analyses presented earlier.A brief summary of results: The differences between men and women in attitudes and understanding of congestion charging are negligible when difference in car availability is taken into account. The frequently discussed difference between inner city inhabitants and people living in the regional periphery, too, turns out to be largely explained by differences in car ownership.When experience is gained, people do indeed trust that charging mitigates congestion to a higher extent than they did before: Those that agree that ?congestion charges will decrease [have decreased] the queues to and from the inner-city? is a significantly larger proportion of the population during the Trial, than they were before. Also in accordance with previous results, the attitudes towards the charges became more positive after introduction. This was a continuous process over time, so that attitudes were more positive during the Trial than before, and even more positive after permanent introduction than they were during the Trial. However, the results clearly show that the change in attitudes was much stronger, and continued over a longer period of time, than what could be explained by the learning effect leading to a better understanding of the effects on congestion.Thus, based on our results, our understanding of which the influential factors are behind the observed effect from experience on attitudes to charging, has to be modified. The mechanisms clearly go beyond ?demonstrating? that charging may effectively mitigate congestion, which is the reason most commonly given in the literature so far.Our results have important policy implications for which arguments that can be expected to be most effective in building public acceptance for charging, and which subpopulations that are most likely to be influenced by such argumentation.
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| 4. |
- Bråred Christensson, Johanna, 1965, et al.
(författare)
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Limonene hydroperoxide analogues differ in allergenic activity
- 2008
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Ingår i: Contact Dermatitis. - : Wiley. - 0105-1873 .- 1600-0536. ; 59:6, s. 344-352
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Background: The fragrance terpene R-limonene is a very weak sensitizer but forms allergenic oxidation products upon contact with air. Oxidized (ox.) limonene is a frequent cause of contact allergy in clinical testing. Objectives: This study investigates the sensitizing potencies of ox. and non-ox. limonene and of structurally closely related limonene hydroperoxides. The clinical importance of the difference in sensitizing potency of two hydroperoxides in autoxidized limonene was studied. Patients/Methods: Ox. and non-ox. limonene were investigated in the murine local lymph node assay (LLNA). Limonene hydroperoxides were investigated using a modified LLNA involving non-pooled lymph nodes and statistical calculations; patch testing of patients with known contact allergy to ox. limonene was performed. Results: A marked increase in the sensitizing potency of ox. limonene compared with that of pure limonene was observed in the LLNA. One analogue, limonene-1-hydroperoxide, was a significantly more potent sensitizer than the other hydroperoxides and gave more positive test reactions in the allergic patients. Conclusions: The results support that hydroperoxides have a specific reactivity indicating that oxygen-centred radicals are important in hapten–protein complex formation of hydroperoxides. The primary oxidation products of ox. limonene, the hydroperoxides, have an important impact on the sensitizing capacity of the oxidation mixture.
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| 5. |
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| 6. |
- Haraldsson, Mattias, et al.
(författare)
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Estimating the economic lifetime of roads using road replacement data
- 2008
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Rapport (populärvet., debatt m.m.)abstract
- This paper analyses the economic lifetime of roads in Sweden using a data over kilometres of new roads together with a "centrality" index constructed from population statistics. The relation between economic lifetime and centrality is performed by poisson regression. It is shown that roads in more central parts of the country and in parts more affected by population changes (increase) generally have shorter economic lifetimes. The analysis shows economic lifetimes of Swedish roads to be between 25 and 111 years, with the majority of the economic lifetimes in the upper part of this range (above 70 years).
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| 7. |
- Henningsson, Susanne, 1977, et al.
(författare)
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Possible association between the androgen receptor gene and autism spectrum disorder.
- 2009
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Ingår i: Psychoneuroendocrinology. - : Elsevier BV. - 0306-4530 .- 1873-3360. ; 34:5, s. 752-761
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Autism is a highly heritable disorder but the specific genes involved remain largely unknown. The higher prevalence of autism in men than in women, in conjunction with a number of other observations, has led to the suggestion that prenatal brain exposure to androgens may be of importance for the development of this condition. Prompted by this hypothesis, we investigated the potential influence of variation in the androgen receptor (AR) gene on the susceptibility for autism. To this end, 267 subjects with autism spectrum disorder and 617 controls were genotyped for three polymorphisms in exon 1 of the AR gene: the CAG repeat, the GGN repeat and the rs6152 SNP. In addition, parents and affected siblings were genotyped for 118 and 32 of the cases, respectively. Case-control comparisons revealed higher prevalence of short CAG alleles as well as of the A allele of the rs6152 SNP in female cases than in controls, but revealed no significant differences with respect to the GGN repeat. Analysis of the 118 families using transmission disequilibrium test, on the other hand, suggested an association with the GGN polymorphism, the rare 20-repeat allele being undertransmitted to male cases and the 23-repeat allele being overtransmitted to female cases. Sequencing of the AR gene in 46 patients revealed no mutations or rare variants. The results lend some support for an influence of the studied polymorphisms on the susceptibility for autism, but argue against the possibility that mutations in the AR gene are common in subjects with this condition.
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| 8. |
- Jonsson, Lina, et al.
(författare)
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Accident externality and vehicle size
- 2009
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Rapport (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Vehicle mass is a crucial factor for the distribution of injuries between occupants in involved vehicles in a two-vehicle crash. A larger vehicle mass protects the occupants in the vehicle while on the same time inflicts a higher injury risk on the occupants in the collision partner. This mass externality can be internalized to reach a situation where the drivers choose vehicle mass based on the social optimum instead of a private optimum that ignores the negative effects that a large vehicle mass has on the injury risk in presumptive collision partners. Using a database including collision accidents in Sweden involving two passenger cars during five years, the influence of vehicle mass on the injuries and thereby the accident cost in both vehicles is explored. The database contains information on road infrastructure, vehicle characteristics including vehicle mass and characteristics of the occupants in the vehicles including their injuries. To get a measure of the accident cost the Swedish official economic valuation of slight injuries, severe injuries and fatalities are applied. In each accident the two involved vehicles are divided into the lighter vehicle and the heavier vehicle and the effect of weight is examined separately for the two groups. The accident cost that falls on the lighter vehicle increases with the mass of the heavier vehicle and decreases with own mass. Given that a vehicle is the heavier one in the crash, neither the own mass nor the mass of the lighter vehicle significantly affect the accident cost. The expected external accident cost is calculated and it is shown to increase rapidly with vehicle mass. The paper discusses different solutions to internalize this external accident cost and calculates a mass dependent multiplicative tax on the insurance premium in a no-fault insurance system.
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| 9. |
- Jonsson, Lina
(författare)
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Regionaltågssatsningars effekt på fastighetsvärden - en studie av Västkustbanan i Skåne
- 2007
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Rapport (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- I samband med byggandet av den nya järnvägssträckningen mellan Landskrona och Helsingborg byggdes kring år 2000 flera nya pågatågsstationer både längs den nya järnvägssträckningen men även längs med den tidigare järnvägen. Dessa nya stationer som placerades på orter som tidigare helt saknat tågtrafik ger en möjlighet att jämföra utvecklingen på dessa orter med utvecklingen på andra liknande orter. I denna studie används förändringar i fastighetspriser för att se om och i vilken utsträckning som den nya tågtrafiken har ökat ortens attraktivitet som bostadsort. En av de stora fördelarna med fastighetsprisstudier är att en prisförändring fångar in värdet av alla förändringar utifrån konsumentens synvinkel och värdering. För att skatta tågtrafikens inflytande används en difference in difference – modell där en kontrollgrupp med fastigheter som inte berörs av tillgänglighetsförbättringen används för att kontrollera för den allmänna prisutvecklingen I området. Resultaten visar att vi för majoriteten av orterna med ny tågtrafik inte kan se någon effekt på fastighetspriserna i perioden efter att tågtrafiken startade. Det är endast för en ort, Rydebäck, som det finns tecken på att fastighetspriserna i området inom 2 km från stationen har haft en högre prisökningstakt än kontrollområdet.
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| 10. |
- Jonsson, Ulf, 1960-, et al.
(författare)
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Inledning
- 2009
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Ingår i: Kritiska tänkanden i religionsvetenskapen. - Nora : Bokförlaget Nya Doxa. - 9789157805430 ; , s. 7-18
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Bokkapitel (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)
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