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...

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...

Global climate change--perhaps even more than other environmental problems--can be addressed successfully only with a solid understanding of its economic dimensions. This paper, prepared as an introduction to the economics section of a forthcoming book from the Pew Center on Global Climate...

Cap-and-trade systems have emerged as the preferred national and regional instrument for reducing emissions of greenhouse gases throughout the industrialized world, and the Clean Development Mechanism--an international emission-reduction-credit system--has developed a substantial constituency,...

Environmental policy discussions increasingly focus on issues related to technological change. This is partly because the environmental consequences of social activity are frequently affected by the rate and direction of technological change, and partly because environmental policy interventions...

California’s Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006 limits California’s greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in 2020 to their 1990 level. In 2006, three studies were released indicating that California can meet its 2020 target at no net economic cost — raising questions about whether opportunities...

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...

We perform an empirical analysis of the influence of price and price structure on residential water demand, using the most price-diverse, detailed, household-level water demand data yet available for this purpose. Ours is the first analysis to address both the simultaneous determination of...

Economists have expended considerable effort to develop economically meaningful definitions of the somewhat elusive concept of "sustainability." We relate such a definition of sustainability to well known concepts from neoclassical economics, in particular, potential Pareto improvements (in the...

The possibility of encouraging the growth of forests as a means of sequestering carbon dioxide has received considerable attention because of concerns about the threat of global climate change due to the greenhouse effect. In fact, this approach is an explicit element of both U.S. and...