The purpose of this research effort is to examine the feasibility of designing a stated preference instrument to elicit the public’s willingness-to-pay (WTP) for remediation of leaking underground storage tank (LUST) sites (or perhaps prevention of releases). Nearly 500,000 releases have been...

The impacts on biodiversity and ecosystems are among the key reasons for concern about climate change. Integrated assessment models are the main tools used to estimate the global economic benefits of policies that would address climate change, but these models typically include only a partial...

This paper empirically discriminates between alternative household decisionmaking models for estimating parents’ willingness to pay for health risk reductions for their children as well as for themselves. Models are tested using data pertaining to heart disease from a stated preference survey...

Numerous nonmarket valuation studies have examined the impacts of environmental commodities on house prices, but little attention has been given to how shifts in these commodities affect the occurrence of home transactions, and the resulting welfare implications. Using a novel theoretical...

This paper develops and applies an integrated model of human mortality and morbidity valuation that is consistent with principles of welfare economics. The standard expected utility model of one person facing two health states (alive and dead) is extended to a setting in which two family members...

Government agencies routinely use the “value of a statistical life” (VSL) in benefit-cost analyses of proposed environmental and safety regulations. Here I review an alternative approach for valuing health risks using a “life-cycle consumption framework.” This framework is based on an...

Hedonic property value models are widely used, but are susceptible to omitted variable bias and potentially invalid conjectures regarding the assumed measure of environmental quality. This paper focuses on an application where both are of particular concern: leaking underground storage tanks. I...

The water quality index (WQI) has emerged as a central way to convey water quality information to policy makers and the general public and is regularly used in US EPA regulatory impact analysis. It is a compound indicator that aggregates information from several water quality parameters. Several...