This chapter for the Handbook of Law and Economics provides an economic perspective of environmental law and policy. We examine the ends of environmental policy, that is, the setting of goals and targets, beginning with normative issues, notably the Kaldor-Hicks criterion and the related method...

Probably the most vexing problem raised by the cost-benefit analysis of environmental regulation is how to deal with the fact that the loss of human life generally does not occur contemporaneously with the exposure to certain contaminants. In some cases, the environmental exposure produces a...

This Essay examines and explains the positions of the principal interest groups over the past four decades with respect to the two central questions of environmental policy: the appropriate policy goal and the instrument that should be used to carry out the policy. With respect to the first...

For the last four decades, benefit-cost analysis has been a mainstay of the U.S. federal regulatory process and, under Executive Orders in effect since 1981, such analysis must generally be used to justify significant federal regulations. While administrations of different parties have...

In 2008 we founded the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University School of Law with four overarching goals: to publish scholarship on critical policy issues; to improve government decisionmaking through advocacy; to build the capacity of other organizations to make economic arguments...

Recent advances in technology and the consequent decline in manufacturing costs are making energy storage systems a central element of energy and climate change policy debates across the nation. Energy storage systems have the potential to provide many benefits such as lower electricity prices...

This paper provides an economic perspective of environmental law and policy with regard to both normative and positive dimensions. It begins with an examination of the central problem in environmental regulation: the tendency of pollution generators in an unconstrained market economy to...

Whenever legislators and regulators adopt a regulatory change, they face an important question: how should existing actors be required to respond to the new law? For example, if regulators drastically reduce the level of emissions that new plants are permitted to discharge, they might...

Efforts to reduce greenhouse gases and control climate change implicate a wide range of social, moral, economic, and political issues, none of them simple or clear. But when regulators evaluate the desirability of climate change mitigation through cost-benefit analysis, one factor typically...

Since the publication of Revesz and Stavins (2007), there have been some significant normative advances in the area of environmental law and economics. For example, the emergence of climate change as the area of central concern for environmental regulation has brought a great deal of attention...