When external effects are important, markets will be inefficient, and economists have considered several broad classes of economic instruments to correct these inefficiencies. However, the standard economic analysis has tended to neglect important distinctions and interactions between the...

The transfer study, a technique used in cost-benefit analysis, is an increasingly important tool used by government agencies to assess environmental regulatory policy. This innovative book develops protocols for using the transfer method to approach environmental problems and introduces several...

When external effects are important, markets will be inefficient, and economists have considered several broad classes of economic instruments to correct these inefficiencies. However, the standard economic analysis has tended to neglect important distinctions and interactions between the...

The standard history of modern environmental economics often views it as an application of A.C. Pigou's theory of externalities, refined over the decades and applied to environmental problems in the 1960s, when the first detailed pro-posals for pricing pollution were outlined by Allen Kneese,...

As its practitioners know well, benefit-cost analysis walks a fine line between the positive and normative, between the science of economics and the art of political economy. Missteps threaten to undermine its credibility as a value-free science, while overcaution risks irrelevance to the...

This paper shows that the capitalization of local amenities is effectively priced into land via a two-part pricing formula: a \ticket" price paid regardless of the amount of housing service consumed and a \slope" price paid per unit of services. We first show theoretically how tickets arise as...

The economics of environmental federalism identifies two book-end departures from the first-best, which equates marginal costs and benefits in all local jurisdictions. Local governments may respond to local conditions, but ignore inter-jurisdictional spillovers. Alternatively, central...

Understanding the spatial variation in housing prices plays a crucial role in topics ranging from the cost of living to quality-of-life indices to studies of public goods and household mobility. Yet analysts have not reached a consensus on the best source of such data, variously using...

We re-evaluate two forms of fiscal illusion in local public finance: debt illusion and renter illusion. The Ricardian Equivalence Theorem for local governments suggests the form of finance of a public program (tax or debt finance) has no effects on substantive outcomes. For the local case, this...