We conduct a national-scale study of the determinants of agricultural land values to better understand how current farmland prices are influenced by the potential for future land development. The theoretical basis for the empirical analysis is a spatial city model with stochastic returns to...

Land-use changes involve important economic and environmental effects with implications for international trade, global climate change, wildlife, and other policy issues. We use an econometric model to identify factors driving land-use change in the United States between 1982 and 1997. We...

We examine the value of terroir, which refers to the special characteristics of a place that impart unique qualities to the wine produced. We do this by conducting a hedonic analysis of vineyard sales in the Willamette Valley of Oregon to ascertain whether site attributes, such as slope, aspect,...

Discussions over tropical deforestation are currently at the forefront of climate change policy negotiations at national, regional, and international levels. This paper analyzes the effects of linking Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD) to a global market for...

Governments contracting with private agents for the provision of an impure public good must contend with agents who would potentially supply the good absent any payments. This additionality problem is centrally important in the use of carbon offsets as part of climate change mitigation....

We use a hazard model to estimate the effect of environmental regulation on the diffusion of membrane cell production technology in the chlorine manufacturing industry. We estimate the effect of regulation on both the adoption of the membrane technology at existing plants and on the exit of...

Scientific and economic consensus increasingly points to the need for a credible and cost-effective approach to address the threat of global climate change, but the Kyoto Protocol to the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change appears incapable of inducing significant participation and...

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is broadly viewed as the world’s most legitimate scientific assessment body that periodically assesses the economics of climate change (among many other topics) for policy audiences. However, growing procedural inefficiencies and limitations...

The introduction of the U.S. SO2 allowance-trading program to address the threat of acid rain as part of the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990 is a landmark event in the history of environmental regulation. The program was a great success by almost all measures. This paper, which draws upon a...

Two decades have passed since the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990 launched a grand experiment in market-based environmental policy: the SO2 cap-and-trade system. That system performed well but created four striking ironies. First, by creating this system to reduce SO2 emissions to curb acid...