Approximately $30 billion (2000$) has been spent on Superfund clean-ups of hazardous waste sites, and remediation efforts are incomplete at roughly half of the 1,500 Superfund sites. This study estimates the effect of Superfund clean-ups on local housing price appreciation. We compare housing...

While residents receive similar benefits from many local government programs, only about one-third of all households have children in public schools. We argue that capitalization of school spending into house prices can encourage residents to support spending on schools, even if the residents...

Because of difficulties measuring pollution, many prior papers suggest a subsidy to some observable method of reducing pollution. We take three papers from the Journal of Environmental Economics and Management as examples, and we extend them to make an additional important point. In each case,...

This paper examines the extent to which state taxes have inhibited interstate transport of" hazardous waste for disposal in the United States. It uses panel data from the Toxics Release" Inventory (TRI) and the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA) on interstate" shipments of waste, and...

The Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act (CERCLA) of 1980 follows the "polluter pays" principle by placing retroactive liability on responsible firms. Yet this cost is borne by current shareholders who did not benefit from past low-cost waste management. This...

Many of the world's environmental problems cross international borders, and to address those problems approximately 1,000 different International Environmental Agreements (IEAs) are in operation today. Most evidence, however suggests that those IEAs are ineffectual, merely ratifying...

This paper estimates the impact of a user fee and a curbside recycling program on garbage and recycling amounts, allowing for the possibility of endogenous policy choices. Previous estimates of the effects of these policies could be biased if unobserved variables such as local preference for the...

This paper builds two simple general equilibrium models to demonstrate the equivalence between the Pigovian tax and the combination of a presumptive tax and an environmental subsidy. A presumptive tax is a tax that is imposed under the presumption that all production uses a dirty technology or...

This paper examines the generation and management of solid waste (MSW) through the lens of economics. We estimate that the global burden of MSW amounted to 1.3 billion metric tons in 1990, or 0.67 kilograms of waste per person per day. Industrial countries account for a disproportionate share of...

This paper develops a utility maximizing model of household choice among garbage disposal, recycling, and littering. The impact of a user fee for garbage collection is modelled for heterogeneous households with different preferences for recycling. The model explains (1) why some households...