Many arguments about decentralization in public goods provision have testable implications for the relationship between decentralization and the level and spatial variability of public goods. This paper explores the empirical relationship between decentralization and environmental public good,...

From at least the time of the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in Solid Waste Authority of Northern Cook County v. U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the federal courts have led an assault on the Clean Water Act (CWA). The primary target of their attack has been on the scope of “waters” encompassed...

This paper reports the results of laboratory test of the performance of a non-point source (NPS) water pollution abatement scheme suggested by Pushkarskaya and Randall (2006). The scheme is based on voluntary participation in the non-point source pollution control program, and ties individual...

In river systems, costly upstream pollution abatement creates downstream welfare gains. Absent adequate agreement on how to share the gains, upstream regions lack incentives to reduce pollution levels. We develop a model that makes explicit the impact of water quality on production benefits and...

Consider a group of agents located along a polluted river where every agent must pay a certain cost for cleaning up the polluted river. Following the model of Ni and Wang (2007), we propose the class of alpha-Local Responsibility Sharing methods, which generalizes the Local Responsibility...

Artisanal and small scale gold mining (ASGM) is a major source of anthropogenic mercury (Hg) to the environment globally, and to West Africa, and these inputs have led to environmental contamination and human exposure. While studies have documented the effects of Hg inputs in West Africa, there...