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...

This paper documents the effect of primary forest cover loss on increased incidence of malaria. The evidence is consistent with an ecological response. I show that land use change, anti-malarial programs or migration cannot explain the effect of primary forest cover loss on increased malarial...

This paper considers two central problems in our statistical frameworks which impair the ability to use wealth to assess economic sustainability or the impacts of economic downturns. Some increases in wealth may reflect increased economic rents—in particular, land and exploitation rents—and...

This paper surveys recent literature examining the relationship between environmental amenities and urban growth. In this survey, we focus on the role of both exogenous attributes such as climate and coastal access as well as endogenous attributes such as local air pollution and green space. A...

Using novel US environmental spill data, we document a robust negative relationship between the number of spills a firm experiences in a given year and its contemporaneous and lagged (but not future) cash flow. In addition, studying two natural experiments, we find an increase (decrease) in...

This article examines and quantifies the relationship between local amenities and prices in an equilibrium model, demonstrating the role of non-traded goods and federal taxes. I derive formulae using factor shares to infer local land rents, productivity, and the total value of amenities from...

We explore the consequences of treating the multiple, non-market benefits associated with improvements in ecosystem health and the market economy from which damage to these ecosystems stems as an integrated system. We find that willingness to pay measures of use-based ecosystem services are...

Using data assembled by the Global Environmental Monitoring System we examine the reduced-form relationship between various environmental indicators and the level of a country's per capita income. Our study covers four types of indicators: concentrations of urban air pollution; measures of the...

This study showcases the usefulness of field experiments to the study of environmental and resource economics. Our focus pertains to work related to field experiments in the area of 'behavioral' environmental and resource economics. Within this rubric, we discuss research in two areas: those...