Through a survey the authors study willingness to pay for improvements in air quality in Sofia, Bulgaria. Using a stochastic payment car approach - asking respondents the likelihood that they would agree to pay a series of prices - they estimate the distribution of willingness to pay various...

One of the most contentious debates today is whether pollution-intensive industries from rich countries relocate to poor countries with weaker environmental standards, turning them into pollution havens. Empirical studies to date show little evidence to support the pollution haven hypothesis,...

This paper presents a case study of willingness-to-pay (WTP) estimation using random valuation models. A contingent valuation survey was conducted in Yerevan, Armenia to estimate people's WTP for the protection of Lake Sevan. Three elicitation formats-open-ended, closed-ended, and the stochastic...

In many cases, the relationship between environmental pollution and economic development can be generally depicted by an inverted U-shaped curve, or an environmental Kuznets curve, where pollution increases with income at the beginning and decreases after a certain level of income. However, what...

Economic analyses of development projects and policies often involve assigning an economic value to changes in the risk of loss of human life. A typical term used in the economic analyses is the value of statistical life, which reflects the aggregation of individuals'willingness to pay for fatal...

One of the major difficulties in doing cost-benefit analysis of a development project is to estimate the total economic value of project benefits, which are usually multi-dimensional andinclude goods and services that are not traded in the market. Challenges also arise in aggregating the values...

Using plant-level data on more than 1000 Chinese industrial plants, the authors estimate a production function treating capital, labor, water, and raw material as inputs to industrial production. They then estimate the marginal productivity of water based on the estimated production function....

Environmental performance rating and disclosure has emerged as a substitute or complement for traditional pollution regulation, especially in developing countries. Using data from China's Green Watch program, this study extends previous research on performance rating and disclosure by...

There have been extensive theoretical studies of firms'responses to environmental regulations ad enforcement but few empirical analyses of firms'expenditures on pollution abatement in response to different regulations and enforcement strategies. The authors empirically analyze the pollution...

This paper presents a study of willingness-to-pay of the Armenian Diaspora in the United States to protect Armenia's Lake Sevan, a unique and precious symbol of the Armenian cultural heritage. Dichotomous choice contingent valuation questions were asked by mail surveys to elicit...