According to biologists, increasing streamflows is among the measures necessary to protect salmon and other native fish in the Pacific Northwest. Yet our understanding of the costs and most cost-effective approaches is hampered by lack of comparative experience. This article attempts to address...

Land-use regulations are contentious everywhere because of their potential negative effects on private property values. In recent years, so-called pay or waive compensation legislation was passed in a number of US states, requiring governments to compensate property owners for losses due to...

This paper examines biofuels from an economic perspective and evaluates the merits of promoting biofuel production in the context of the policies’ multiple objectives, life-cycle implications, pecuniary externalities, and other unintended consequences. The policy goals most often cited are to...

The analysis finds that in addition to U-shaped paths of environmental quality arising for growth in income per capita, growth in population can also produce socially efficient patterns that are U-shaped. Sufficient conditions for both types of paths are identified for a range of models and...

Based on a model where climate change affects productivity, the second-best optimal carbon tax is found to exceed marginal social damage by 53% and ‘‘marginal private damage’’ (aggregate households’ willingness to pay) by 73%. Annual welfare gains are estimated at $3.58 billion when...

Recent literature has investigated whether the welfare gains from environmental taxation are larger or smaller in a second-best setting than in a first-best setting. This question has mainly been addressed indirectly, by asking whether the second-best optimal environmental tax is higher or lower...

The incentives for growing fuelwood on small farms are examined using survey data from Kenya. The analysis finds that tree planting is a competitive activity and that farmers are responsive to incentives to plant trees. These incentives vary across households facing different factor...