This paper explores the implications of endogenous risk for the economic value of preventing groundwater contamination. We consider the analytical implications of endogenous risk for five key building blocks frequently used to structure studies of groundwater valuation: The probability and the...

We design an experiment to test whether the rationality induced by market discipline spills over to nonmarket settings - a rationality spillover. Our results confirm this new phenomenon. The rationality induced by market discipline extends to the nonmarket setting, and these spillover effects...

We develop three propositions about the ex ante value of reduced risk. If there is a continuous outcome distribution and if self-protection influences outcome probability and severity, then: (1) unobservable utility terms cannot be eliminated from the ex ante value expressions; (2) knowledge of...

The concept of endogenous risk implies that an individual can privately influence many of the hazards he or she confronts. This realization has profound impacts on environmental policy, which in the past has been driven by an assumption of exogenous risk. Three key interdependencies now come to...

In a world of incomplete markets for environmental goods, ex ante planned expenditures rather than ex post realized outcomes explain the values individuals attach to these goods. We use the distance function to develop restrictions from a model of ex ante consumer behavior involving these goods....

Just as ecology has benefited from the economic theory of optimization, economics can benefit from the ecological theory of adaptation. We examine the impact of short-term, nongenetic adaptive self-protection on the values individuals attach to uncertain prospective environmental resources. We...

We adopt a framework to specify a household's child development technology with a set of interdependent inputs and outputs, finding significant, productive dynamic effects due to young children's Head Start participation. Our panel data estimates show that initial counter-productive partial...

We propose a static three-stage incentive-compatible, budget-balanced, execution-contingent scheme for a regulator to allocate biodiversity protection responsibilities across a landscape mosaic having multiple value-interdependent owners. The scheme motivates owners to truthfully report their...

The federal government now confronts considerable political pressure to add CO2 to the existing set of criteria air pollutants. As with current criteria pollutants, proposals call for control of CO2, assuming that the control of the each of the three criteria pollutants is separable from the...

We use estimates of parents' discount rate, inferred from their decisions to treat their children's body burdens of lead, to test empirically a model of transmission of cognitive skills from parents to children. The development of a child's cognitive skills depends in part upon the specific...