Pigou (1920) advocated for taxes, set equal to marginal damages, on goods produced and consumed that involve negative externalities. Samuelson (1954) laid out the conditions for optimal pure public goods provision, but noted that free-riding (the “demand revelation” problem) was likely to...

The levels of public goods provided by government are determined in part by the form of political institutions in a country. Countries governed by democratic institutions arguably will provide public goods at different levels than countries ruled by autocrats or an elite group. To examine this...

This paper examines the link between pollution and income. It shows how income inequality affects environmental policies and therefore pollution. The Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC) hypothesis proposes that there is an inverted U-shape relation between environmental degradation and income per...

The choice experiment elicitation format confronts survey respondents with repeated choice tasks. Particularly within the context of valuing pure public goods, this repetition raises two issues. First, does advanced awareness of multiple tasks influence stated preferences from the outset, and...

Governments contracting with private agents for the provision of an impure public good must contend with agents who would potentially supply the good absent any payments. This additionality problem is centrally important in the use of carbon offsets as part of climate change mitigation....

Governments contracting with private agents for the provision of an impure public good must contend with agents who would potentially supply the good absent any payments. This additionality problem is centrally important in the use of carbon offsets as part of climate change mitigation....

This paper analyzes the extent to which international public goods and agency problems are present in international organizations. A noncooperative model of the funding choices of donor countries and the subsequent policy choices of an international agency is used to develop hypotheses about the...

Despite a large theoretical and empirical literature on public goods and common-pool resources, a systematic comparison of these two types of social dilemmas is lacking. In fact, there is considerable confusion about these two types of dilemma situations. As a result, they are often treated...

In response to the perceived quality of a public good, households may choose to incur averting expenditures as a substitute to its aggregate provision, thereby revealing an (inverse) demand function. When unobserved heterogeneity affects both perceived quality and averting behavior,...

As the Copenhagen Accord indicates, most of the international community agrees that global mean temperature should not be allowed to rise more than two degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels to avoid unacceptable damages from climate change. The scientific evidence distilled in the Fourth...