Estimating the economic benefits of reduced health damages due to improvements in environmental quality continues to challenge economists. We review welfare measures associated with reduced wildfire smoke exposure, and a unique dataset from California’s Station Fire of 2009 allows for a...

By using data on self-rated life satisfaction as an empirical indicator of well-being, this paper estimates the valuation of two major air pollutants differentiated by people’s age category (stage in the life cycle) and birth cohort. Life satisfaction regressions involving about 59,000...

The siting of wind facilities is extremely controversial. This paper uses data on 11,331 property transactions over nine years in northern New York State to explore the effects of new wind facilities on property values. We use a fixed-effects framework to control for omitted variables and...

Water quality regulation continues to be controversial, as demonstrated by recent litigation between the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the state of Florida over nutrient standards. While the costs of standards are usually known, benefits may be diverse and difficult to identify. This...

This article investigates the value of reducing non-point-source pollution in Green Bay, Wisconsin. Using stated preference methods, we find the lower bound on the benefits of reducing runoff enough to universally increase water clarity by 4 ft is greater than $10 million annually. Using a...

Hedonic property value models are widely used but are susceptible to potentially invalid conjectures based on the assumed measure of environmental quality. This paper focuses on an application where this is of particular concern: leaking underground storage tanks. I estimate a hedonic model...

We show how stated preference information obtained from a choice experiment, and revealed preference information based on housing market transactions, can be combined via generalized method of moments (GMM) estimation. Specifically, we use a moment condition matching the predicted marginal...

Omitted, misspecified, or mismeasured spatially varying characteristics are a cause for concern in hedonic house price models. Spatial econometrics or spatial fixed effects have become popular ways of addressing these concerns. We discuss the limitations of standard spatial approaches to hedonic...

Views of natural areas and green space may have value quite apart from access to those lands. Using 25 years of home sales data from St. Louis County, Missouri, and modern geographic information system tools to measure views, we estimate a hedonic property fixed-effects model that captures the...

In contingent valuation, the willingness to pay for hypothetical programs may be affected by the order in which programs are presented to respondents. With inclusive lists, economic theory suggests that sequence effects should be expected. However, when policy makers allocate public budgets to...