My interest in Peak Oil theory was sparked by an eccentric friend of mine about two years ago. He lived next to an unusually deep lake and wanted to know if I thought it would be smart to buy up a few hundred barrels of oil and store them in his lake and then sell them later for a profit. He...

This dissertation consists of two theoretical papers on market-based environmental policy. The first paper exploits the correlation between the environmental performance of firms and their economic performance to show that financial markets can be used to help enforce environmental policy and to...

In recent years, government aid agencies and international organizations have increased their financial commitments to controlling and eliminating malaria from the planet. This renewed emphasis on elimination is reminiscent of a previous worldwide campaign to eradicate malaria in the 1960s, a...

In the absence of markets for environmental quality, researchers resort to stated and revealed preference techniques to estimate the benefits of environmental programs. One of the most widely used revealed preference approaches is hedonic property value models, where the value of an...

There are hundreds of thousands of crude oil and natural gas wells across North America that are currently not producing oil or gas. Many of these wells have not been permanently decommissioned to meet environmental standards for permanent closure, but are in an inactive state that enables them...

Policy analysis of nonmarket goods requires accurate knowledge about the behavior of economic agents. This dissertation explores several facets of behavior models in recreational angling for three New England groundfish species.Stated preference methods are used frequently for nonmarket...

Due to the growing concerns with climate change and energy supply, Energy Performance Contracting (EPC), which uses the guaranteed future utility savings to repay the initial renovation investments, becomes increasingly popular. However, most Energy Service Companies (ESCOs) set the savings...

The formation of harvest cooperatives has recently generated considerable interest among fishermen and regulators as an alternative to other rights-based systems such as individual transferable quotas. Many consider the promotion of self-governance to be essential to more sustainable, equitable...

This research investigated the general association between corporate environmental performance and the firms' annual returns independent of any particular environmental event. The association analysis was based on the most recent environmental data for the years 2006, 2007, and 2008. The results...