The Value of a Statistical Life is a key input into the calculation of the benefits of environmental policies that save lives. To date, the VSL used in environmental policy analyses has not been adjusted for age or the cause of death. Air pollution regulations, however, are linked to reductions...

The field of Health Impact Assessment is relatively new to the United States, but already a number of state and local governments are incorporating these assessments into land use planning and decision making. In five years, the use of HIA in the U.S. has increased dramatically with more than...

Our land use control system operates across a variety of multidimensional and dynamic categories. Learning to navigate within and between these categories requires an appreciation for their interconnected, dynamic, and textured components and an awareness of alternative mechanisms for achieving...

Professor William Rodgers is one of the handful of legal academics who have shaped and influenced environmental law since it was created out of whole cloth in the late 1960s. The staggering quantity, quality, breadth, and creativity of his scholarship are perhaps unrivaled among his peers. It is...

This paper updates the mortality cost of expenditures. Because changes in income lead to changes in mortality risk, regulatory expenditures costing more per life saved than a threshold cost-per-life saved cutoff level are expected to increase mortality risk. This article discusses the mechanisms...

This is a substantially revised, refocused, and updated version of an earlier draft paper, exploring the significant role Cost-Benefit Analysis (CBA) plays in facilitating or impeding legislative and regulatory policy decisions. The paper centers around three case studies of CBAs EPA prepared...

Environmental, health, and safety advocates, say Richard Revesz and Michael Livermore, have been wrongly hostile to cost-benefit analysis because of a false belief that it is biased against regulation. The bias against regulation, while real, has been the artifact of historical accident - the...

Economics provides tools to value the environment and impacts to it. The environment produces goods and services that contribute to the wellbeing and utility of humans. Human actions that adversely impact on the environment change the flow of goods and services and utility of humans. Economic...

The net effect of policies to reduce harm to potential victims is sometimes much smaller than the predicted effect because of failure to account for victim offsetting behavior (OB). A simple expected accident loss model is developed where one parameter, the coefficient of diminishing returns,...

Although much has been written about the ethical implications of choosing to use cost-benefit analysis as a regulatory decision procedure, the ethical choices made “inside” cost-benefit analysis tend to be obscured by the technicality of cost-benefit procedures. Indeed, Congress, courts, and...