This paper explores what a critical commentary on micro principles texts might look like, examining what is to be critiqued and how to do it.

Economic theory suggests that liberalization of trade between countries with differing levels of environmental protection could lead pollution- intensive industry to concentrate in the nations where regulations are lax. This effect, often referred to as the “pollution haven” hypothesis, is...

Prescribed fire is a useful but risky method for reducing general wildfire risk and improving wildlife habitat, biodiversity, timber growth, and agricultural forage. In the past the fifteen years, laws is some states have been adopted to support the use of prescribed fire. This article examines...

When asymmetry or non-verifiability of information, or non- excludability of users, makes contracts incomplete or unenforceable, and where for these and other reasons there are impediments to efficient bargaining, we show that private contracting will not generally assign the control of assets...

Monetary incentives are one approach for increasing response rates in contingent valuation surveys. We present the results of a case study desgined to assess the effect of incentives on response rates and respondent behavior. We compare response rates and quality of answers for five incentive...

The ultimatum game experiment has a long history in experimental economics. In-vivo ultimatum like strategic settings often involve uncertain rejection and payoff reversals. This paper presents the results of an ultimatum like experiment extended to reflect characteristics of a shared...

In the contest of environmental management, the problem of minimizing the expected cost due to random checking processes and a possible failure is here addressed. Non-homogeneous Poisson checking processes with continuous non-decreasing intensity are considered, leading to the explicit detection...

This paper is one of two working papers concerning the waste management sector transition project run from MERIT under the direction of René Kemp. This paper examines some of the numerous meanings and interpretations associated with the words “institution” and “institutions” and the...

Countries rich in natural resources constitute both growth losers and growth winners. We claim that the main reason for these diverging experiences is differences in the quality of institutions. More natural resources push aggregate income down, when institutions are grabber friendly, while more...

Market based policies are fast becoming the recommended policy panacea for all the world’s environmental problems. Implicit in such recommendations is the theory that free markets, adjusted for externalities, can always create an “efficient” allocation of society’s resources. As a...