It has occasionally been asserted that regulators typically overestimate the costs of the regulations they impose. A number of arguments have been proposed for why this might be the case, with the most widely credited one being that regulators fail sufficiently to appreciate the effects of...

Considerable interest has been expressed recently in prospects for water quality trading markets between nutrient sources in the Chesapeake Bay Watershed. Allowing such flexibility in response to the terms of recently announced total maximum daily load (TMDL) restrictions might considerably...

The EPA has a cornucopia of cleanup and reuse programs ranging from the Superfund Program which addresses sites posing imminent danger and many of the most hazardous sites nationwide, to the Brownfields Program which addresses lower risk sites. These programs provide a common set of primary...

Both biologists and economists are concerned about invasive species. There are several well-documented instances in which biological invaders have done extensive damage. This has led some economists to conclude that biological invaders should be treated as a form of "pollution", and that the...

There has been great interest in recent decades in “ecosystem services”. One of the services most often mentioned is the retention of nutrients. I construct a simple model of agricultural land use under a regulatory requirement that nutrient loading cannot exceed a fixed ceiling develop...