Empirical evaluation of policies to mitigate climate change has been largely confined to the application of discounted utilitarianism (DU). DU is contro-versial, both due to the conditions through which it is justifed and due to its consequences for climate policies, where the discounting of...

We exploit a unique panel of 75 metro areas (‘cities’) across the globe and employ a cityfixed effects model to identify the determinants of within-city changes in air pollution concentration between 2005 and 2011. Increasing car and population densities significantly reduce air pollution...

The Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) of the Kyoto Protocol has a dual objective: to encourage low-cost emission reduction and to promote sustainable development in the host countries of CDM projects. The CDM has by and large delivered on the first objective but arguably not on the second. This...

To analyse the consequences of the changing economic structure of the UK, we need a set of statistics broken down by industry that are consistent with the whole economy measures available from the national accounts. The theory of growth accounting then provides a framework in which the...

In order to value non-market goods, economists estimate individuals’ willingness to pay (WTP) for these goods using revealed or stated preference methods. We compare these conventional approaches with subjective well-being (SWB), which is based on individuals’ ratings of their happiness or...

Subjective wellbeing data is becoming increasingly popular in economics research. The wellbeing valuation approach uses wellbeing data instead of data gleaned from preferences to attach monetary values to non-market goods. This method could be an important alternative to preference-based...

Conventional cost-benefit analysis incorporates the normally reasonable assumption that the policy or project under examination is marginal in the sense that it will not significantly change relative prices. In particular, it is assumed that the policy or project does not change the underlying...

This paper investigates how corrupt public officials and private agents adjust to policy reforms that change opportunities for bribery deals to take place. I exploit an exogenously determined tariff liberalization program that altered opportunities to extract bribes through a particular method...

Developing countries are vulnerable to the adverse effects of climate change, yet there is disagreement about what they should do to protect themselves from antic- ipated damages. In particular, it is unclear what the optimal balance is between investments in traditional productive capital...

This paper is about net national product (NNP). We are concerned with what NNP means, what it should include, what it offers us and, therefore, why we may be interested in it. We show that NNP, properly defined, can be used as a gauge for project evaluation, but we also show that it should not...