This paper estimates an augmented measure of national output inclusive of environmental pollution damage in the United States economy over a 60-year period. The paper reports two primary findings. First, air pollution intensity declined precipitously from the 1950s to the modern era. Air...

Input-output (I-O) analysis represents the flows of goods and services within the market. Environmentally-extended I-O (EEIO) models include flows of both pollution and consumption of resources and energy. The present paper proposes a conceptual structure for EEIO accounts that builds on the...

How much of the economy is focused on protecting, rehabilitating, or managing the environment? To answer this question, we develop a proof-of-concept environmental activity account to quantify the environmental goods and services sector (EGSS) in the United States. Methodologically, we employ a...

In recent years, US investment has been lackluster, despite rising valuations. Key explanations include growing rents and growing intangibles. We propose and estimate a framework to quantify their roles. The gap between valuations -- reflected in average Q -- and investment -- reflected in...

A persistent issue in environmental economics is whether growth is sustainable. Pollution is a key driver of sustainability, which we define as an economy exhibiting falling pollution damages at its balanced growth path. We deduct air pollution and carbon dioxide damages from the national...

The literature on the optimal harvest of fisheries has concentrated on a single fishing area with biomass uncertainty and to a lesser degree also with price uncertainty. We develop and implement a stochastic optimal control approach to determine the harvest that maximizes the value of a fishery...

Orcinus Orca is the world's largest predator, and simultaneously a significant tourist asset and cultural icon for much of the Pacific Northwest. In the past two decades, the Southern Resident Killer whales (SRKW) have declined by more than 25 percent, and this population appears on a...

Credit markets and property rights are fundamental for modern economies, but they also have implications for the commons. Using a dynamic model of competitive resource extraction, we show that improving property right security unambiguously increases conservation incentives, but the effect of...

This article develops and implements a Real Option approach to value renewable natural resources in the case of Marine Fisheries. The model includes two sources of uncertainty: the resource biomass and the price of fish, and it can be used by fisheries to optimally adapt their harvesting...

The problem of the commons is more important to our lives and thus more central to economics than a century ago when Katharine Coman led off the first issue of the American Economic Review. As the U.S. and other economies have grown, the carrying-capacity of the planet -- in regard to natural...