In 1999 US Congress passed the National Air Quality and Telecommuting Act. This Act established pilot telecommuting programs (Ecommute) in five major US metropolitan areas with the express purpose of studying the feasibility of addressing air quality concerns through telecommuting. The major...

We study determinants of market organization of local public services by an empirical examination of one of the most visible municipal services, residential waste management. Using a multinomial logit model and data for 1,000 U.S. communities, we explore the effect of political influence, voter...

Many economists see current land use patterns as inefficient due to various market failures, and planners argue that current patterns do not follow sound planning practice. One policy of interest to both groups is transferable development rights (TDR). TDRs allow the development rights from land...

Extended producer responsibility (EPR) embodies the notion that producers should be made physically or financially responsible for the environmental impacts their products have at the end of product life. The EPR concept has taken hold in Europe and is garnering wide interest in the United...

Solid waste management services are contracted out to private firms in many U.S. communities. Household waste collection, transport, and disposal are relatively straightforward services to define within the terms of a contract. The addition of recycling, however, significantly complicates...

Regulation of mobile source emissions in the US has evolved as a complex combination of central government and decentralized authority. The central government required uniform new car emissions standards in the 1970 Clean Air Act, but gave states the power to meet ambient air quality standards...

Several studies that have solved for optimal solid waste policy instruments have suggested that transaction costs may often prevent the working of recycling markets. In this paper, we explicitly incorporate such costs into a general equilibrium model of production, consumption, recycling, and...

Many environmentalists and policymakers are shifting their focus from media-specific pollution problems to product-specific, life-cycle environmental problems. In this paper, we develop a model of production and consumption that incorporates life-cycle environmental externalities-specifically,...