The standard theory that the first-best tax on pollution is equal to marginal environmental damages has been extended in two directions. First, many polluting activities are difficult to tax because they are not market transactions, and so recent papers have shown that the same effects can be...

This paper builds two simple general equilibrium models to demonstrate the equivalence between the Pigovian tax and the combination of a presumptive tax and an environmental subsidy. A presumptive tax is a tax that is imposed under the presumption that all production uses a dirty technology or...

Increasingly, local governments compete by offering substantial subsidies to industrial plants to locate within their jurisdictions. This paper uses a novel research design to examine the consequences of successfully bidding for a plant on county-level labor earnings, property values, and public...

The paper explores a number of issues related to lot size and urban density. First, trends in single-family residential lot size over the past 35 years are examined in eight counties in the state of Maryland. We find that there was a trend toward larger lot sizes in many suburban counties in the...